ATI Cashes in Chips

Wow. For the last 8 years or so, I've heard rumor of either ATI or Nvidia being bought by either AMD or Intel. After almost a decade of rumor and speculation, it turned real today, when there was an announcement that AMD is buying ATI for 5.4B (4.2 of that in, as mookie would say, cash-money)

It raises more questions than it answers, but it certainly will shake up the processor and graphics market some.

Will AMD become more competitive on the integrated chipset side of things? What does this mean to Nvidia's business in that space (squeezed between ATI/AMD and Intel integrated rocks and hard places)?

Will this make ATI more competitive vs Nvidia in their AIB business, and AMD more competitive vs Intel on the CPU side of things going forward? Or is it like Andy Grove once said, "Just because you tie two rocks together doesn't mean they'll float"?

Will the AMD-integration strengthen ATI as a corporation, or diffuse (de-fuse?) it's culture and expertise as happened to other acquired graphics corporations of years past?

It'll be interesting to watch from the sidelines. That's for sure.