In spite of reorganization announced by Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday, which put development of central processing units and graphics processing units (GPUs) into the same organization, the former graphics products group will retain its GPU development network and the ATI brand.

“We will continue to develop GPUs in a variety of locations, including Markham, Orlando, and Sunnyvale. Radeon, Mobility Radeon, FirePro and Firestream GPUs will continue to carry the ATI brand,” said Chris Hook, a spokesperson for AMD.

AMD acquired ATI Technologies back in 2006 with the aim to integrate graphics processing engines into central processing units (CPUs). The first "Fusion" processors with both x86 and graphics cores are projected to emerge in 2011, but in the meantime AMD will continue to supply AMD Athlon and Phenom microprocessors as well as ATI Radeon and FirePro discrete graphics processing units.

As a result of the reorganization announced on Wednesday, AMD will merge various developers, designers and other specialists into special teams that will be responsible for development of future technologies, creation of actual products based on the new technologies, advertising of AMD’s products and sales of AMD’s products. However, the reorganization will not cause any relocations among hardware developers, therefore, the restructuring mainly concerns formalities as well as enables better interaction between CPU and GPU designers.

Tags: ATI, AMD, Radeon, FirePro, Fusion