ATI Technologies

Ljubisa Baic is a Toronto chip designer.

His career runs through AMD, specifically the Toronto GPU operation AMD got when it bought ATI in 2006.

He rose to director of chip design there.

His boss for a stretch? Jim Keller, the architect behind AMD's Zen chips and Apple's early iPhone silicon.

The analyst who broke down the deal on announcement day put it simply.

He's going back home to the mothership.

AMD even framed the deal around its ATI-era Toronto roots, retaining Canadian talent its own GPU shop trained.

A 20-year loop closed.

When Lisa Su took over, their core CPU business was losing market share in servers and PCs.

Now, they bought this thing, ATI Technologies, in 2006 to get into the graphics card game.

That deal left them c- left saddled with a mountain of debt.

A lot of people thought that there was a risk of this company going bankrupt.

I guess, you know, that was their main competitor growing up.

It was called ATI, actually.

You remember ATI? Okay, ATI was like the older graphics card maker.

And then AMD bought them.