AMD to Ditch the ATI Brand

New AMD Radeon Logos and Branding

AMD wants to move toward having as few logos as possible, but this isn’t an easy task. Fundamentally it wants to have two brands: Vision for systems and Radeon for graphics. However, this is slightly disingenuous, as there are already five sub-brands in the Vision family – a vanilla, Premium, Ultimate, Black and Pro. Worse still, while the first three of that list are a nice red logo, the Vision Black logo is a murky olive green and the Vision Pro logo is a lighter green.


The claim from AMD is that we’ll only have two logos for its newly named graphics division, Radeon for gaming-class graphics cards and FirePro for its professional cards. Volkman also said that OEMs (system builders) wanted a transitional period, so there are actually two sets of these logos, one with ‘Graphics’ across the bottom and one with the AMD brand – OEMs are free to use whichever they want, though Volkman belieived most would start with the ‘Graphics’ ones and move to the fully AMD ones. He predicted that the transition would be complete within a year, though admitted he saw the change happening much quicker.


When asked whether we’d see a similar breakdown of the Radeon brand to fit price-to-performance ranges, Volkman evaded the question. We’re fairly confident that we’ll see a continuation of the Vision logos with the Radeons – with Black for enthusiast-level cards, Premium for the next step down and so on. The interesting part will be whether AMD bothers to make a GPU for a low-end discrete card considering that it’ll have Fusion APUs (CPUs with ‘Radeon-class’ GPUs integrated).

Volkman did say that ‘APUs will be branded Visions’ and that a system with an AMD CPU or APU will be branded Vision. If a system has a CPU from another manufacturer (no guesses who that is) but has a Radeon graphics card, you’ll see a Radeon logo sticker. Interestingly, we’ll never see the Fusion logo on a PC or laptop – that’s reserved for being a ‘sell-in brand, a brand for the industry to use’.


We can see the aim of the re-branding exercise, to cut the confusion between AMD and its graphics division ATI, and the logo scheme should deliver on this. AMD will keep the Radeon brand too, so it’s not like it’s throwing all those years of history and heritage in the bin.

It’s over to you now – do you think AMD’s strategy will make buying PC hardware more straightforward? Do you mourn the loss of the ATI name or are you happy to see that Radeon will live on? Leave your thoughts in the forums.