Qualcomm Buys AMD/ATI’s Mobile Graphics

By Geoff Duncan January 20, 2009

Qualcomm Buys AMD/ATI

Mobile technology giant Qualcomm has announced it is buying AMD’s mobile graphics and multimedia assets for some $65 million in cash. The buyout lets the struggling AMD put $65 million in its pocket for assets acquired as part of its acquisition of graphics developer ATI—which AMD has now written down (repeatedly) to less than half the $5.4 billion it paid for ATI back in 2006. Qualcomm, on the other hand, gets enhanced mobile multimedia technology, which it plans to use to enhance 2D and 3D graphics capabilities, as well as audio and other multimedia capabilities.

“This acquisition of assets from AMD’s handheld business brings us strong multimedia technologies, including graphics cores that we have been licensing for several years,” said Qualcomm executive VP Steve Mollenkopf, in a statement. “Bringing this technology in-house creates even greater synergy as we seamlessly integrate the best-in-class multimedia performance AMD offers into our system-on-chip (SoC) products.”

Qualcomm says it will be extending employment offers to “various design and development teams” from AMD’s handheld business, but didn’t go so far as to promise a job to everyone who worked on AMD’s handheld technology business.

According to the companies, the deal has already garnered regulatory approvals. Qualcomm has been licensing 3D graphics technology from AMD since late 2007.

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