Citing Consumer Awareness, AMD Officially Retires 25-Year-Old ATI Brand

It’s officially the end of an era. AMD has confirmed what has been rumored for a few months now, that it plans to drop the ATI brand name. AMD says it’s doing so because consumers are more familiar with AMD, so it makes no sense to try to keep pushing the ATI brand. Pour one out for ATI when you have a moment.

AMD told Thinq that, in its surveys of consumers, they found that brand awareness of the AMD name was far and away more thorough than brand awareness of ATI. Adios, ATI.

You could see the changeover for months now. The company’s Catalyst drivers for its Radeon series of graphics cards switched over to AMD branding a few months ago, and if you were to buy a Radeon 6000 series graphics card you’d see AMD and not ATI on the box.

Nothing beyond the name changes, so you can expect the same sort of experience as you had before: pretty decent hardware often held back by relatively lackluster drivers. Sticky top right hand corner glitch, anyone?