Easily the biggest announcement of the week is the long-rumored but now-confirmed $5.4 billion merger between #2 CPU maker AMD (which is far behind Intel) and graphics chip maker ATI, which has held a narrow lead as the #1 GPU maker over arch-rival Nvidia for the last few years.

In broad strokes, this means that two of the most complicated parts of your PC might now be produced by a single company, and that could either be a disaster of epic proportions or a huge advance for computing as we know it.

In the short term, little is likely to change much. Drivers for ATI graphics boards may run a bit better on AMD hardware, but that's probably about all we'll see for a few years: Both the AMD and ATI sides of the company (and who knows if the ATI name will survive; I doubt it) will continue their death struggle with rivals Intel and Nvidia. Intel may try to snap up Nvidia for itself.

But the real news will probably start to heat up a year or more for now, as AMD and ATI start to share knowledge and start working toward a widely-expected integrated CPU-GPU platform. Today, the phrase "integrated graphics" is a computing joke: Intel's "Graphics Media Accelerator" couldn't accelerate itself out of the driveway, much less compete with a real graphics card on any 3-D video game.

AMD + ATI could change all that. High-end graphics without an expensive, power-hungry add-in graphics card? Whoa, sign me up. The idea of an integrated CPU and GPU could change everything from the way PCs are architected, to case designs, to even console gaming. An Xbox 720 could run rings around the 360. There's even talk of AMD moving into consumer electronics and cell phone handsets.

Or... this could all turn into one big debacle for everyone involved. The engineering feats required to combine two extremely complex technologies may indeed prove too difficult to overcome, at least in the short term.

Alas, for now, there's mostly just speculation about how this will end up. Just about every technology and news site online has its own take on the merger.