"If you are in the hole, stop digging," is what Mike Magee, founder of The Register and The Inquirer would tell you. AMD is trying to justify killing the ATI brand, a move that has not been well-accepted in the graphics world. In short, our readers are not happy (please express your feelings in comment section below. ed.), and most of the industry insiders we met in Silicon Valley seem to agree.

At this point, many believe that AMD should gradually fade away the ATI brand. A reasonable idea would be to simply announce the AMD Radeon 6000 Series family and let people speculate why the company ditched the gaming brand. But since this is AMD, and since this is the company that completely mutilated its Fusion brand, we cannot expect anything better.

Many people believe ATI is a stronger brand than AMD. Over the years, ATI has won more successful product rounds with graphics than AMD has with processors. It's been a while since AMD has had dominance over Intel in this respect, and it doesn’t look like anything is going to change in the processor market until 2011. It is especially unwise for AMD to execute any game-changing CPU plans now, at a point where ATI is winning in the 40nm race against Nvidia - the company that was more than six months late with its latest generation of graphics products.

We could continue ranting all we want about how disappointing AMD's decision was to drop the ATI brand, but the company has officially made its final word clear. ATI is dead, just like 3DFX. As far as we are concerned, however, the debate is still not over.