While it's no secret that many felt that the AMD / ATI merger wasn't going to be good, I don't think many saw it spiraling out like this, today reports come in from the AMD camp about Q2 bringing down a $950 million hit. The company plans to take an $880 million impairment charge on parts of it's ATI acquisition relating to handheld and DTV units of their Consumer Electronics Group, this added with other charges bring the total filing to just short of the $1 billion mark with the SEC.

The apparent upside is that while this is only a preview of things to come the 17th the company is planning to make an impact on that number when it closes sales of some of their 200mm wafer fabrication tools for a $190 million jump allowing the company to hopefully spin it into something productive as they are in the midst of restructuring the company to get it back in the game. Shareholders seem to have felt some reassurance with the company stock rising from $4.80 to $5 although this falls short of even their double digit pricing last year.

The news would probably bring some bit of joy to NVIDIA but they currently face their own issues with a price war taking tolls, entire batches of GPU's being labeled as defective and a new lawsuit on the floor from Rambus relating to patent violations in their memory controllers. It seems that all camps are taking hits right now in the marketplace in the midst of an already troubled economy. One would hope that these companies find resolve to keep technology going and rise out of the trouble they're currently dangling in right now.

We'll follow up with more as AMD makes their disclosure on July 17th. Hopefully there's more details to what entirely brought about the $880 million charge.