Nvidia will go up because ATI has canceled some kind of contract with Intel and now it will go to NVIDIA. ATI will go up too because AMD is buying their stock at around $20. AMD is going down for now but i think it will go up again later on, six months ago they were at $40.
I personally think that this merger is fairly stupid. AMD is primarily a CPU company, and should therefore focus on being the best CPU manufacturer possible, divesting non-core businesses along the way; not the opposite.
stupid? you think the market is too smart. it will happen. don't trade against it. Day Trading Rule #1: don't think what you think, think what the market thinks.
You don't understand the future. All CPU companies also have chipsets. The future is the Physics Graphics Card/Accelerator that integrates well with CPU pipelines. Read more. INTC already has slight lead. Research more carefully... http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/8887 nitro Disclaimer: I am long ATYT from $14 and change.
AMD will catch up to Intel's CURRENT level with the purchase but Intel is going to innovate harder and leave AMD eating dust.
I'm not arguing this from a trading perspective, I'm looking this from a business perspective. There has been plenty of prior buzz that AMD will buy ATI and/or that Intel will acquire Nvidia. It also looks like this will go through, given the premium offered by AMD to acquire ATI. ATI primarily does two things: chipsets and discrete graphics. AMD interestingly enough has in the past opted to stay away from chipset design (remember how they introed the first chipsets for Athlons and Opterons?). AMD has also spun off its Flash business. AMD has also been suffering from capacity constraints, so I doubt somewhat that ATI will discontinue outsourcing production to TSMC et. all in the near future. I will say that I suspect where this acquisition is headed - ATI graphics plugged into a "4x4" type system design (though doing so would require some major changes to the way that motherboards are currently designed).
I disagree regarding the importance of physics acceleration. Some further research on your part would lead you to a large quantity of articles that are more or less outright bashing discrete physics acceleration (Ageia PhysX). Graphics acceleration was arguably a paradigm shift (starting with the Voodoo accelerators), physics acceleration thus far seems fairly worthless, particularly if you expect someone to buy three expensive video cards (ATI's near-future pitch).