AMD Develops New Linux Open-Source Driver Model 142
An anonymous reader writes "AMD privately shared with Phoronix during GDC2014 that they're developing a new Linux driver model. While there will still be an open (Gallium3D) and closed-source (Catalyst) driver, the Catalyst driver will be much smaller. AMD developers are trying to isolate the closed-source portion of the driver to just user-space while the kernel driver that's in the mainline Linux kernel would also be used by Catalyst. It's not clear if this will ultimately work but they hope it will for reducing code duplication, eliminating fragmentation with different kernels, and allowing open and closed-source driver developers to better collaborate over the AMD Radeon Linux kernel driver."
AMD (Score:2)
Better integrated GPUs in lower-cost CPUs. Why choose Intel?
Intel (Score:1, Insightful)
Lower power consumption in better CPUs. Why choose AMD?
Re:Intel (Score:5, Informative)
Lower power consumption in better CPUs. Why choose AMD?
The most recent generation of chips definitely has power issues, but it seems like you get a lot more bang for your buck with AMD. What can you get that is decent from Intel for $120? You can get a fairly decent chip from AMD for that.
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Hell, a 40$ APU from AMD beats anything Intel has to offer for almost twice as much, not to mention that even at that price the AMD has a decent GPU while the Intel has none at all.
Re:Intel (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, a 40$ APU from AMD beats anything Intel has to offer for almost twice as much, not to mention that even at that price the AMD has a decent GPU while the Intel has none at all.
This is why I think AMD tends to be represented more in the DIY arena. Companies like Dell don't want to sell you a $150 CPU+motherboard upgrade. They want to sell you a $1200 PC. If you're going to throw away your old case, PSU, video card, RAM, hard drive, DVD drive, etc - then you might as well spend an extra $200 on the CPU.
On the other hand, if you're only upgrading CPU+MB, and maybe RAM, then AMD makes a lot more sense. If my options are to spend $500 every 6 years on an Intel CPU+MB, or $150 every other year on an AMD CPU+MB, then I'll take the latter. I'll actually spend less money, and for most of the time I'll have a better system. Sure, the Intel system will outperform the AMD system in years 1-2, but the AMD system will outperform in years 3-6, and by a huge margin in the last two years. A CPU is a rapidly-depreciating asset, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend a lot of money going high-end - you're far better off buying something moderate and replacing it more often. Then Moore's Law will work for you, and not against you.
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If my options are to spend $500 every 6 years on an Intel CPU+MB, or $150 every other year on an AMD CPU+MB, then I'll take the latter. I'll actually spend less money, and for most of the time I'll have a better system. Sure, the Intel system will outperform the AMD system in years 1-2, but the AMD system will outperform in years 3-6, and by a huge margin in the last two years. A CPU is a rapidly-depreciating asset
Not really. I'm still using an i7-860 from 2009, if you compare [anandtech.com] them to an FX-8350 they're trading blows, the Intel wins 9 of these benchmarks and AMD 4. Granted the FX-8350 was released in 2012, but AMD doesn't have anything newer while Intel does. In terms of "what would be an upgrade for me?" it's not even close, I was considering the i7-4770K but while clearly superior to my processor it's still not compelling enough. Personally I'm looking at possibly buying a Haswell-E/X99 combo, because despite the h
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I would say AMD generally prices their parts competatively. If you are talking about >$300 Intel parts, you are correct that AMD has nothing to offer (I don't count 220W parts as viable, as I'm not in the market for a desk-side-vacuum-cleaner). But at $180 an FX-8350 looks pretty competative vs a $200 i5-4570:
http://www.tomshardware.com/ch... [tomshardware.com]
If you are using efficiently multi-process applications (e.g. video compression), AMD is the clear winner. If you are using mostly-single-process applications (Blizz
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On idle vs load, AMD is running about 25watts per hour more idle and about 60watts per hour more under load. Assuming 22 hours per day idle and 2 hours full load, that's about an extra 244 KWHs per year extra for AMD. Fo
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Funny, but I changed from an AMD Phenom II X6 1090t to an Intel Core i7 4770 because the motherboard went bad. I find that the Intel does a lot better for the work I do, web app development, operating system development and gaming.
The real point is that AMD has nothing for power users. If you want to be cheap and go sub $200 for your CPU, AMD is great. If you want real power, AMD can't help you. They just don't care about power users anymore. The only line I can even look at on the desktop side is the FX
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Genuinely curious here.. what kind of salary range do you think is appropriate for a person to be spending $200+ on CPU alone?
Re:Intel (Score:5, Informative)
i7-860 1217 / 5110 (812 samples, single threaded / overall)
FX-8350 1512 / 9049 (3149 samples, single threaded / overall)
The AMD in question is winning against the Intel in question in single threaded, and winning greatly in multi-threaded. However this AMD chip, at $200, is not really what the GP was talking about. He was talking about ~$150 APU's that also saves him money on a video card.
Comparison of the i7-860 vs the A10-6800K [cpubenchmark.net]
i7-860 1217 / 5110 (812 samples, single threaded / overall)
A10-6800K 1555 / 5006 (205 samples, single threaded / overall)
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Humm... a site that offers absolutely no actual benchmarks just a mysterious performance number (check their FAQ [passmark.com]) with zero ability to reproduce or verify, submitted by users with all kinds of overclocked rigs that's credible. For example it claims the FX-8350 has much better single thread performance (1,512) vs (1,217) which is not supported by any serious review I can find. So either the whole world is in a conspiracy against Passmark, or these numbers are a joke. I wonder how much AMD paid them to invent
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As opposed to all the "official" benchmarks that have been compiled to give Intel an edge against AMD?
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For example it claims the FX-8350 has much better single thread performance (1,512) vs (1,217) which is not supported by any serious review I can find.
Its supported by the one you linked to, whose results you either clearly misunderstood or completely misrepresented on purpose.
You claimed that the Intel won 9 benchmarks while the AMD only won 4, but in actuality when someone carefully looks at the results its the Intel that only won a single benchmark, not the 9 you claimed, while the AMD won the other 12. Note where it says "lower is better" and "higher is better" you are supposed to use your brain in order to interpret the results rather than misrepr
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And a midrange i5 CPU will beat AMD's top of the line FX-8350, so what is your point? Both of those cost the same.
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AMD's use of Hypertransport makes it a bit easier to create fast low latency interconnects, needed for high performance clusters or supercomputers.
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Look like you've missed the last two generations of Intel HD video. An Intel HD 5000 is a VERY GOOD video card, even for some gaming (though not sure about last-gen gaming).
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With Intel I get 12hs out of my laptop (MacBook Air 2013). I'd never go AMD on a laptop.
Then again, you're right that you get more bang for buck: my desktop is AMD. Eight 3.0Ghz cores for a very low price. But price isn't always the only factor.
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The FX-6300 is actually faster in multi-threaded cases, which isn't surprising since it has 6 cores vs 2. The single-threaded performance of the Intel processor is clearly better. So, I'd call that one a bit of a toss-up depending on needs.
The Intel chip definitely uses less power though - that is one thing I definitely don't care for in my Phenom II systems - heat management is a real problem.
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And remember, this is comparing against a previous generation, lower end than needs be Intel chip.
Looking on Newegg I don't see much else at the arbitrary $120 price-point.
Of course, if I were actually buying an Intel chip I doubt I'd buy one at that price. That was basically my point - the Intel chips are much better when you get up there in price, but at the lower end the AMD chips are fairly competitive. In the current generation Intel has more of an edge - 10 years ago AMD was much better in this space.
Somebody else argued that with the right optimization AMD does much better than the benchmarks s
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Why choose AMD?
Because they're trying to wean us off this IBM PC/x86 nonsense?
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To be fair, intel did try this, too (ia64). It was amd that extended x86 to 64 bit land.
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I bought an AMD E-350 motherboard and a Chenbro case with 4 removable drive bays. It takes a slimline optical drive (which actually has a BD-RE drive, because they weren't much more expensive than DVD drives, although in the 3 years since I bought it I've yet to burn a single BD).
It's running FreeBSD, booting from a RAID-Z array (so cheap snapshots, block-level checksums, single drive failure recovery, and all of that good stuff). The GPU is now supported and so it runs XBMC connected to my projector f
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Why choose intel?
1. better performance in just about everything
2. lower power consumption
3. more overclocking headroom
4. chipsets 'just work' and don't tend to have bizarre compatibility problems.
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On the higher end it really depends. If you are doing software development, then the multi-core support of an 8350 m
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Why choose intel?
1. better performance in just about everything
If you're willing to pay. Not everyone need the top performing CPU on the market.
2. lower power consumption
A very valid point, but irrelevant on the desktop area (unless you live somewhere where electricity is expensive, maybe?). Quite valid for laptops though.
3. more overclocking headroom
Really? You think that will make people choose Intel? 90+% of the people don't even know what overclocking is.
4. chipsets 'just work' and don't tend to have bizarre compatibility problems.
As do AMD's.
Sure, there's plenty of scenarios where Intel is a better choice. But there's plenty of others where AMD is the best choice.
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This is good news indeed. The more open source drivers we use, the better. At least it is then possible to inspect and improve in principle, whereas with proprietory drivers, it's practically impossible.
Thank you, AMD, for trying to make the world a better place!
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The proprietary driver includes licensed/patented code that they can't legally use in an open source driver.
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In addition to what other people have said, GPU drives contain shader compilers and probably other kinds of optimization routines which actually give a "competitive advantage".
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Well, here's the thing... to at least a moderate extent, Intel isn't really competing against AMD or nVidia, because unless something has changed relatively recently, they don't have anything that comes even close to the offerings of the latter in terms of performance. So if AMD or nVidia learns something about how Intel chips works and improves their own a bit as a result, they're not going to take away much business from Intel. On the other hand, if AMD open-sourced the guts of their driver and nVidia lea
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The GMA500 driver might be doing fine, but for some reason they keep licensing third party graphics for the integrated solution on Atom processors, or at least the ones making it into industrialized products. Getting OpenGL up under Linux on PC/104 or other embedded board is a royal pain in my experience.
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The GMA500 driver might be doing fine, but for some reason they keep licensing third party graphics for the integrated solution on Atom processors, or at least the ones making it into industrialized products. Getting OpenGL up under Linux on PC/104 or other embedded board is a royal pain in my experience.
Open source support depends on whether they're licensing it from PowerVR or using their own in-house graphics. If you check this page [wikipedia.org] Intel now use their own graphics in "Valleyview" systems, which should be much more open than before.
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they have some shockingly badly supported gpu;s on netbooks. that with cinimon are running the cpu at 250% at idle due to software rendering. with mate its around 5% idle. But no 3d anything and im sure the gpu could work quite well
Licensing issues with opening the code (Score:2, Informative)
That point was specifically addressed the the article. It isn't that AMD can't legally open up the code, but that is where they view their secret sauce of optimizations and tweaks. If they were to open it up, they fear that competitors might get a leg up and be able to use the same tricks.
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that's a stupid place to hide secrets.. I guarantee that nvidia has already reverse engineered the driver. open the code and put it under a license that prevents it being used with anything but a radeon graphics card, which is basically what's going to happen anyway. At least then the code can be built/rebuilt/ported/debugged with the rest of the system when needed.
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That doesn't really make sense. The architectures of the three main GPU vendors are sufficiently different that it's highly unlikely that the can benefit much from tricks in the drivers (which are basically compiler optimisations these days, since the performance-critical part of the driver is the shader compiler). nVidia uses something that looks more or less like a scalar CPU (with some SIMD) but with SIMT so that if you run threads in lockstep they just do one decode but execute several steps at once.
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There's absolutely NO denying anything to any module.
Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems AMD have taken on-board what Nvidia chose to ignore.
Being the advice offered by the Kernel devs
http://lists.linux-foundation.... [linux-foundation.org]
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Go fuck yourself.
Re: What? (Score:1)
How do you think the open source radeon driver came to be?
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Well, much of the open source community got its start when ESR got upset that he couldn't make a proprietary printer driver do what he wanted it to. Perhaps you should look at your question again. You may still decide that it's reasonable that a corp should decide what capabilities the hardware it sold you should make available, but you also might change your mind.
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No, no, I still don't get it! The hardware is proprietary, what difference does it make if the driver is or isn't as well?
The biggest difference (for me) is card support. I could fire up Kubuntu 13.10 with X server 1.14 on my old AGP ATI X1650 card and would work like it should. If proprietary drivers were the only choice I would be SOL. If I found the old driver that was designed for that card the chances of getting it to work with a modern kernel/X server would be extremely slim. The current Catalyst driver only supports back to the HD 5000 series so my desktops that I use on a daily basis with HD3*** and HD4*** cards ar
Does AMD still matter? (Score:1, Troll)
Ever since I read this [gurufocus.com] article, I have been taking a closer look at AMD. What I find is that this is a company in trouble. When I visit computer shops, I do not see anything equivelent to AMD Inside!
Question is: Does AMD still matter?
Re:Does AMD still matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, both of the high-performance current-gen game consoles use AMD. On that basis alone, they're quite unlikely to go anywhere.
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You might have said the same thing about IBM's consumer PowerPC business relatively recently too ;)
Being the chip in current consoles is *far* from a demonstration that you're not going anywhere. In fact, it's a sign that you're willing to give tech away for super cheap in order to get bulk orders in.
Re: Does AMD still matter? (Score:1)
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I use AMD APU's, but as a Linux user the first thing I do is disable the Radeon portion in the BIOS on pop in an NVIDIA card.
That would be an extremely dumb thing to do with the current generation of APUs, what with all the extra performance the tightly-integrated cores can give you for anything not related to graphics.
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HSA means maybe some limited parts of some applications will be sped up, in an indeterminate future, if code has been specifically written for it and if the linux support is good enough. And it is only for A10 7850, 7700 and 7600, the latter of which isn't available. And distros need to ship code that runs on every CPU.
Re:Does AMD still matter? - OS Drivers OK now (Score:2)
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That article for some reason ignores the last 2 quarters where AMD turned a profit. People have being saying AMD is finished for the last ten years, but yet it's still here.
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The console market is guaranteed cash in the bank, with no competition from any other player. There's few companies that have a deal like that.
And the margin is quite good considering that Microsoft and Sony shared in development costs.
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I'd be interested in knowing the true numbers because all AMD videocards prices have gone through the roof in the last few months. As an example, the ASUS R9 270X was available for around 240$CAD in january but today it's selling for 289$CAD after a peak of 329$CAD a few weeks ago.
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They were worse off a couple of years back. Now that they have the Xbox One and the Playstation 4 as a steady revenue stream they won't go bankrupt any time soon. Stock ticker prices are also mostly irrelevant. AMD historically has been a company which seldom has had a single profitable year. If you take their financial performance as the sole indicator they should have gone bankrupt decades ago.
I don't know about today but when I bought my AMD CPU a year or two back they had the higher integer performance
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Well, AMD the company is quite different from AMD the Intel-competitor. While they seem to have stopped the downward trend for now, they're doing it by divesting their CPU/APU business and ramping up lots of semi-custom business like consoles and such. It might be a way for AMD to be profitable but large parts of the market will be left to Intel's mercy.
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Yep
Typing this on an AMD Phenom II x 6 core system with an ATI 7850 GPU. I got it in 2010 for $599 and it is a freaking 6 core with full virtualization at that price ... with an Asus board!! ... ok the gpu at the time was a ati 5750.
I do vmware workstation for linux and website testing. I need lots of cores!
An icore7 extreme with a non crippled bios would of nearly trippled the freaking price. Nvidia was pricing graphics cards at $1,000 before the latest Radeons x290 outperformed them for half the price. Th
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I do vmware workstation for linux and website testing. I need lots of cores!
As someone who manages a decent sized VMware vSphere environment, I can tell you that core counts are not so important as you may think. My AMD-based ESXi servers have triple and quadruple the cores of my Intel-based ESXi servers, yet they experience chronic problems with CPU Ready Time at far lower over-subscription rates and even sometimes while under-subscribed if some oversized VMs are present. It's one of the reasons I'm pushing through a complete shift away from high-core count Opterons (24 and 32 cor
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In a server environment a xeon has a ton of cache and that would be ideal for very wide loads. As a workstation I need to make sure IE 6 renders the site right in one, apache outputs it in another, and a large part of the time is loading and unloading things I am learning. SSD really helps this.
I/O or the lack of it would cause this too. The newer chips at AMD are inferior to the older onces per IPC. Things are true cores and not semi cores with shared cache and fpus. This would cause that issue for sure si
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Honestly I have tried Cyrix, I really tried with AMD but at the end I have just gone back to intel.
All my PCs have had AMD processors for ages now, but I'm with you finally. I am tired of the poor power management support in the Linux kernel for AMD, and I don't care whose fault it is.
This new move from AMD is the only thing that could possibly make them relevant in my eyes in graphics, but only if they actually follow through and succeed...
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I have never seen an AMD system crash except once due to the 13.1 driver issues on my system.
They run just fine and Nvidia seems to have the worse drivers this day and age. Shoot they have bricked some cards actually!
This approach has been tried before (Score:2)
The X community has said specifically that this sort of end-run around the GPL is strictly forbidden. I expect yet another flame war over this at any moment.
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The Radeon driver is under MIT, not GPL.
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The X community has said specifically that this sort of end-run around the GPL is strictly forbidden.
Ultimately, only a court can say what is or isn't forbidden. I don't buy the whole can't-link-to-GPL-code argument. If AMD isn't distributing the kernel, then the kernel's license is irrelevant. The fact that AMD's code references kernel symbols doesn't make it a derivative work, unless you buy into the SCO argument that things like #defines are copyrightable. I could see the argument that after the linker resolves the symbols you end up with a derivative work in RAM (maybe), but that image isn't distri
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The ones and zeros that comprise your binaries were copied into "your" object files NOT from your source code but rather from Mr. Stallman's compiler and linker. Your binary files can, therefore, be viewed as very complex derivatives of HIS code, or at the very least as having been linked with thousands (millions?) of fragments of his GPL'd compiler and linker programs.
Sure, but if you build the AMD video drivers nothing but the symbol names and parameter types impact what ends up in the compiled binary. It need not even be built on a system running linux - the only thing the compiler needs access to is the kernel header files. That's just a big list of function prototypes, defines, data types, etc. It is entirely about interoperability as well - an area where courts have overridden copyright in the past (it is actually legal to stick a "NintendoTM" logo in a game made
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For that matter, copyright doesn't cover functionally required material. So copyright can't touch it...if you have a good lawyer. Patents, however, and trademarks, are totally different categories of law. Both are applicable, though in this case I don't think there could be any claim made by the person distributing the GPL code. But someone you've never heard of may hold a trademark that it could be ruled to be infringing. And there's NO reasonable protection from patents. Even a good lawyer, a clear
Correction: (Score:2)
in this case I don't think there could be any claim made by the person distributing the GPL code.
to:
in this case I don't think there could be any claim made under trademark law by the person distributing the GPL code.
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I was referring to the linking argument, not the compiling argument.
The fact that code originating in GCC ends up in the binary has nothing to do with whether it is legal or not to write a non-GPL Linux kernel module that uses arbitrary kernel symbols.
I wasn't really debating anything you said with regard to compilers. Your argument makes sense, though I haven't really given it as much thought. The process of compilation is not creative, but the design of the compiler itself certainly is. I'd have to giv
Phoronix must have juicy drivers (Score:1)
if they state Catalyst exposes OpenGL 4.4 instead of the 4.3 that is the reality for the rest of us. Minor nit but...
It only makes sense. (Score:1)
Linux has roughly 10% of the desktop market in the United States. You'd think that this kind of story wouldn't be so uncommon. As soon as SteamOS is released M$ won't have a chance. Windows 9 will likely be the last version of Windows.
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Do you like to pull numbers from your ass?
If Apple only has around 10% of the desktop marketshare in the USA, Linux has 0.1% at best. In some European countries such as The Netherlands, however, I'm pretty sure Apple's marketshare is much lower and Linux is much higher.
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Given that page counters usage is down and Google Analytics usage is up, I wouldn't trust the numbers from statcounter.
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Google doesn't publish global stats, so I can't quote anything.
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SteamOS handles MS games by streaming them from another machine running Windows...
Same'ol firmware separated from kernel module appr (Score:2)
It doesn't sound all that different. Everyone wanting to stay proprietary has a separate firmware to load by the module; but, the proprietary module has a few more whistles than the one from the community. Is this not the same thing?
Re:Same'ol firmware separated from kernel module a (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure what you're thinking..
A Linux graphics card driver has 3 components: the kernel module, the X module and the libGL/CL/etc implementation.
There are two AMD driver for Linux -- the proprietary one and the open source one, each with it's own 3 components.
The proprietary one offers better OpenGL/OpenCL performance and features (eg, OpenGL 4.4 instead of 3.1), as well as official certification for a number of applications.
But it also tends to suffer from system integration issues, at the kernel and X level. Sometimes, they work poorly for basic things, they don't work with the latest kernel or X for a while, etc.
So, what looks here is that AMD wants to reduce the proprietary to the libGL/CL component and leverage on the open source for the kernel driver. Maybe X driver too, eventually.
Phoronix... sigh. (Score:1, Interesting)
As I've been Linux user for a while now, and am well aware of the articles that Phoronix put out on their god-awful website, is there a particular reason that AMD and other companies seem to cater to them on this front? As far as I can tell, they don't do much that's special other than being an announcement portal of sorts. If their claim to fame is just the latest 'bleeding edge' of graphics support for games on the Linux desktop and slapping it up on an advertised site, I guess I get it. If they're target
VIA? (Score:1)
Is VIA still in the race, at all? Last VIA I heard about was the C7, so it's been a hwile.
Nice, if now they only fixed their driver's issues (Score:2)
A car analogy. (Score:2)
Intel is akin to a Toyota Camry as AMD is a Scion FR-S. On the Camry side of things, presuming the Camry has a V-6, it'll utterly smoke the FR-S, in the quarter mile and 0-60, it's much more practical, room for six and a big roomy trunk. The FR-S is less expensive but less practical, sits lower, a much smaller trunk a non-existent back seat and has proven to be much less reliable. Then again, the FR-S is a zooty two-door, rear wheel drive, and an utter hoot to drive, while the Camry is . . . a Camry.
Havi