Several weeks after the announcement of ATI Technologies acquisition by Advanced Micro Devices it is still unclear whether the latter will retain brand-name of the former, or will just drop it in favour of its own. On the one hand, dropping “ATI” trademark means increased value of AMD brand-name, but attaching AMD to the name of Radeon graphics cards means that their popularity may drop.

Several representatives of AMD and ATI have made statements to Custom PC web-site in regards the future branding strategy of the combined company and it transpires that ATI name may vanish into oblivion.

“The new company will be called AMD,” Gareth Cater from AMD is reported to have said.

“We haven’t made any final decisions yet, but I’d personally be very surprised if we dropped any of those product names. The ATI company name is definitely going, though,” Richard Baker, channel marketing channel manager at AMD in Europe, is quoted as saying.

“I don’t have a personal emotional attachment to it [the brand], one way or another. I think the important thing is that we’re going to make good products. ATI may be gone, but certainly lots of discussion is going to come over the next few days about the rest of our brands and their strengths,” Chris Hook, the head of ATI Technologies public relations department in EMEA, reportedly said.

Even though ATI will become part of AMD later this year, its brand-name may still have value to the market. For instance, it is known that Intel Corp. provides marketing funds for system integrators that employ its chips to advertise systems with Intel inside. Obviously, the world’s largest chipmaker may not be happy to advertise computers employing AMD Radeon graphics cards, which may spur further declines in ATI Radeon market shares. On the other hand, selling microprocessors, chipsets, graphics chips and other multimedia products under one brand-name makes it easier for AMD to advertise it.

While there are companies with “dual” names, such as Fujitsu-Siemens, BenQ-Siemens or Sony Ericsson, it is unlikely that chip companies will employ AMD-ATI brand-name. There are also companies like Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., who have several brands, including Panasonic, Technics or JVC, but those brands are either targeted on different markets, or overlap each other, meaning that certain names may prevail over other.