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AMD has changed that all together. Go check out their support: http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux64/linux64-radeon.html

AMD NAS loooks interesting + new freenas with ZFS could be it.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/ProductInformation/0,,50_2330_9863_13022%5E14814,00.html

The amd cpu you mentioned is a laptop cpu. Turion == laptop cpu. I doesn't matter what case it is in, a laptop cpu is still a laptop based computer. So you are comparing a laptop's cpu power draw to a desktop's cpu power draw. from amd's site: http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118_13909,00.html

• 8.42 : is currently *being* released, links are not updated everywhere. But a few google request may bring you to forums where it is already available. For exemple, Phoroinix have published a link to the driver they did test. I think the release is not official yet because of the reported problems with 2.6.23 kernel. The same google search can also bring out patches to circumvent those problems and even howtos about using the new AIGLX for desktop compositing.
• 8.41 : Is the previous release. It was mainly centered around bringing RadeonHD support on linux. Thus some bugs may have managed to slip by with older chipsets. IT IS available on the ATI website. But it comes with a caveat explaining the situation, that this driver is mainly targeting Radeon HD and that it's "use at your own risk" with previous chipset generations. You're still free to try it on X800XL if you want (Phoroinix did it in their).
• 8.40 : is the latest release using the older code base. Currently it is what has been the most widely tested and debugged for older chipset, so that's why it's the first thing you land on.
• There's a nice wiki about ATI on Linux, with distro specific pages, links to the latest bleeding edge versions and such.

• 8.42 : is currently *being* released, links are not updated everywhere. But a few google request may bring you to forums where it is already available. For exemple, Phoroinix have published a link to the driver they did test. I think the release is not official yet because of the reported problems with 2.6.23 kernel. The same google search can also bring out patches to circumvent those problems and even howtos about using the new AIGLX for desktop compositing.
• 8.41 : Is the previous release. It was mainly centered around bringing RadeonHD support on linux. Thus some bugs may have managed to slip by with older chipsets. IT IS available on the ATI website. But it comes with a caveat explaining the situation, that this driver is mainly targeting Radeon HD and that it's "use at your own risk" with previous chipset generations. You're still free to try it on X800XL if you want (Phoroinix did it in their).
• 8.40 : is the latest release using the older code base. Currently it is what has been the most widely tested and debugged for older chipset, so that's why it's the first thing you land on.
• There's a nice wiki about ATI on Linux, with distro specific pages, links to the latest bleeding edge versions and such.

Ummm...not to rain on your fiery speech, but you might wanna check that you're looking at the right driver page. That link's for older Radeons like the R500/Radeon X1k, version 8.40.4. Not the R600/RadeonHD 2000 series, which is using 8.41.7. :)

It's still not 8.42 like the Phoronix article's talking about, but if you want the drivers that bad it might help to bookmark the corresponding chipset page. Here's the right link (it's got a little "hd" in the URL) which is where it would show up; 8.41's still up there at the moment:

http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/linux-radeonhd.html

And apparently neither you nor the original responder use said drivers. The latest showing up on their site as of 9:31 EST is 8.40.1, not the driver this article purports to cover. Which is what I was why I was asking where the driver was.

This makes four pages on how it almost works not worth much. Also, performance gains through increasing the artifact count don't do much for me.. although I'd be able to say for sure if I could get the driver.

At any rate, you can check for yourself right here: http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/linux-radeon.html

As for the open source drivers, I'll give them some kudos when they're actually available, thanks. Until that happens they haven't got drivers that are worth anything in either closed *or* GPL form.

The site still has not upgraded and shows the same old 8.40.4 driver. There is some official download link? or is TFA talking about some beta version?

It's very cool that the memory becomes available so easily with just a couple driver parameters. It's a pity that there's a lot to optimize before it can really shine.

Memory architecture on a GPU is very different from system memory. Memory there is not linear and the video memory controller will go through a lot of remapping to present it as such, something that's probably very slow because of the VBIOS. Then there's the issue of tuning the bus so that reads and writes are using its full bandwidth, and again a poor VBIOS implementation may be the bottleneck.

The best but harder solution would be to have a means to program the video memory controller directly to map pages of system memory and do all the copying and moving itself. Of course, this is hardly ever going to happen, but some improvements can still make it into the VBIOS, some of which will probably happen once GPGPU-style programming starts getting more attention as both nVidia and AMD/ATI are seemingly interested in pushing with things like CUDA and Stream Computing.

The concept as it is now, however, remains extremely cool. It might still be orders of magnitude slower in terms of latency and throughput compared to system memory, but it should be a lot more responsive than a hard drive just because there are no seek times involved. That said, hdparm -t may not be the best tool for measuring performance, so i'd be more interested in a random access benchmark since it may make some use of the parallel memory architecture inherent on a video card.

Be careful what you wish for. This ATI FireGL card has 2GB of memory:
http://ati.amd.com/products/fireglv8650/index.html

Yeah... The FireGL has been doing that for several years. In fact, they have a 2GB version now, the V8650. Don't try it with games, though. Not going to work so well.

AMD/ATI has had a DX10 graphics line out for months now. 2900, 2600, etc.
http://ati.amd.com/products/Radeonhd2900/index.html

Personally I prefer nvidia stuff. And the drivers are much improved now for the 8800 series.

But I still dont like vista at all, I'll stick with XP for a while, and when I'm dragged kicking and screaming into vista, it will be a secondary partition on a dual boot.

Both ATI and Nvidia's GPU based physics acceleration were being made to work with Havok. ATI was working on a 3 card Crossfire rig, 2 for graphics, 1 for physics. I wonder what this will mean for future developments. http://ati.amd.com/technology/crossfire/physics/index.html

For those of us who really dont care about binary blob vs FOSS when you just want drivers that work:
http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/linux-radeonhd.html

The release notes say it is not intended for x1900 or lower, but be sure I'll be trying it on my T41p anyway.

Compiz Fusion awaits!

As a pleasant side effect for my /.'ers, desktop support will rock too. But I don't think that's what this is about.

I don't have firsthand experience, but the Personal Internet Communicator (or similar devices (e.g. webtv)) may be what you are looking for if you are starting from scratch and have a bit of a budget.

You mean this?
http://developer.amd.com/devguides.jsp#Manuals

http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/Pro ductInformation/0,,50_2330_9863_9864,00.html

I'm sure that the AMD CPU has better performance per MHz than the VIA one, although I didn't bother to find facts about that.

No more than the latency hit for a multi-socket system today when one CPU needs to access memory residing on the other CPU's memory controller. That's the beauty of HyperTransport.

Of course I asked AMD for this 2 and a half years ago. Nice to see it's finally come to life.
http://forums.amd.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid= 28&threadid=34279
They didn't need to wait for HT 3.0 to release this, it would have worked perfectly well back then.

I don't know what you're smoking, but I want some of it.

Let's start with some basic facts, that you can verify for yourself by hitting the long mode specs in AMD and Intel manuals:
1) You need PAE enabled (in CR4). Long mode uses a 4-level paging table scheme (PML4 - PDPT - PD - PT, although you can get away with only using the first three levels if you are fine with a 2MB granularity.
2) The linear address space is 64 bits.
3) The physical address space, ATM AFAIK, is 52 bits, with the other bits reserved for now. Going beyond 52-bits will likely need a PML5).
4) All registers are extended to 64-bit length, there are 8 new general purpose registers registers.
5) I am going to re-iterate - your address space is 64-bits. Your addressable memory is 2^64 - 1. Unlike PAE, where your linear address space is still 32 bits, you do not need an aperture within your linear 4GB to access physical addresses > 4GB.

I have no clue what the hell you talk about when you talk about "pointers", which are a software language concept. On EM64T/AMD64 you can perform direct and indirect MOVs to and from your entire linear (i.e. virtual) address space - and thus, through the "wonder" of paging (which you need enabled to enter long mode in the first place) - to and from your entire physical address space.

If you want a tiny piece of advice - instead of half-understanding mailing-list threads and articles written by people who know what they're talking about TO people who know what they're talking about - just hit the specs. They're free. Shit dude, if you acually bothered to try some 64-bit programming (even at the user, much less system, level) you would see that what you just wrote is just plain wrong.

Since this is Slashdot, I'll even give you links to the specs -
1) http://www.intel.com/products/processor/manuals/in dex.htm
2) http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/DevelopWithAMD /0,,30_2252_11467_11513,00.html

> and major requirement change

It is not a major requirement change, because, contrary to the statement of The Inquirer, the previously optional and now mandatoryfeatures are provided by NVidia (source) and ATI DX10-cards (source).
Both are have 32-bit fp unified shaders and 4xAA.

I was happy to see that once AMD bought ATI, one of the first thing they began doing was releasing proprietary closed source Linux drivers. Prior to that ATI just referred you to a link to the open source third party versions. I will be honest, I do not run ATI hardware, so I cannot comment on the quality of the driver, but here it is.

Would you be satisfied with a new release every month? Maybe you should check out their 64-bit FireGL driver release page:

http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux64/radeonp revious-linux64.html

"They are not going to ever really support Linux well. If that's not clear after 12 years of the above cycle, then you haven't been paying attention."

Normally I would agree, but you might be interested to hear that ATI has new owners and it is possible that these new owners will enforce a change in policy.

Now, even if such a change in policy is shouted from every rooftop I wouldn't recommend that any Linux user buys ATI/AMD graphics products until there is actual working drivers for them, but it isn't fair to assume that ATI/AMD will always be as bad as ATI was on their own.

here just a couple days ago. Not sure how much better they are, but they are making some efforts.

I see absolutely no need to continue developing the desktop (workstations are another story). Here is what is out for the laptop.Core Extreme from Intel. 250 GB hard drives from various vendors. Great graphics solution from Nvidia and AMD. Notebooks can be fitted with up to 4 GB of ram. Notebooks utilized power more efficiently which is important in this energy conscience age. I personally have no need for desktop and will never buy one again. A laptop combined with a good display is enough. It is time for the OEM to get clever and start experimenting on new designs built around mobile components. Imac is a good example of a destop built from laptop components. Maybe special docking station for the hardcore users who want more expansion that the express card slot. A eSATA for notebooks perhaps for extra hard drives.

K6-III peaked at 450.
K6-II went up to 550.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_1260_1288%5E1022~1515,00.html#1543
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_1260_1288%5E1022~1572,00.html#1574

K6-III peaked at 450.
K6-II went up to 550.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_1260_1288%5E1022~1515,00.html#1543
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma tion/0,,30_118_1260_1288%5E1022~1572,00.html#1574

According to this, the Sempron 2500+ runs at 1.4 GHz and had a thermal design profile of 59 W. I assume actual power consumption is greater than the thermal design.

Yes and no,

Some of the bugs will be fixed, others won't. Every CPU has bugs, it's just a fact of life. These things are designed by humans, it's just going to happen. CPU errata happens with Intel (This is the Core2 link) and AMD. None of this is a major threat to most users, and they get worked around by most people pretty quickly. Microsoft have released fixes for the Core2 issue, as have Apple. I don't know whether there has been an update to the kernel for these yet, but I am sure they would get back ported by your distribution.

There is a note here and here regarding the Core 2 bugs, I think one of these might have even become a slashdot article at one point. The two links here both are referring to Linus' comment of it being "Totally insignificant", which given that he worked for Transmeta and knows a lot more about how the industry works, I would be putting a bit of faith in his statement.

As another poster said, keep up to date on your BIOS revs, as CPU microcode does have fixes for this stuff too.

Berny

My only hope is that Intel doesn't skew it's architecture so much that it becomes incompatible and that AMD is left behind. Would be nice if AMD could partner up as well, or create a consortium for "next gen architecture and virtualization enhancements" kinda like how MMX, SSE etc came about for graphics.

Too late - it's already happened. Intel and AMD have incompatible virtualisation technologies. Intel's is called VT with various sub-designations such as VT-d for virtualising DMA. AMD's is called AMD-V and is completely different. AMD have sub-divisions too, such as support for Nested Page Tables which Intel are still developing.

Xen supports both. Not certain about VMWare, but I'd be surprised if they didn't support both too. One interesting fact is that hardware virtualisation isn't faster than software approaches like VMWare's emulation or Xen paravirtualisation. Although this will probably change in future (and also Xen paravirt is no good for you if you want to run Windoze or other binary-only OSes).

Rich.

As can bee seen from the press release, the benchmark was released in April.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoo m/0,,51_104_543~117115,00.html

That said, it is simple wrong to accuse AMD of comparing their parts "with older Intel Xeon quad cores rather than currently shipping ones."

Or is AMD too understaffed to update benchmarks? Fact is, folks, the clearly deceptive post is still there--may have been posted months ago, but gosh, the picture has changed--and not in AMD's favor. Yet, months later, an outdated pipe dream is still posted as if it had a chance of being true.

http://multicore.amd.com/us-en/benchmarks/
LMAO wow.

One AMD Place
P.O. Box 3453
Sunnyvale, California 94088-3453

Lies, lies and more lies. How is Microsoft screwing Apple in this situation?

The iPhone doesn't have to interact on any level with DRM, and the component parts of my system that do interact with it (audio, video) have full 64-bit driver support. I should know, I'm using 64-bit Vista. Even better, XP doesn't have any of the same support for Blu-ray/HD-DVD DRM, so how are they not able to code XP 64-bit drivers? Apple have no excuse in this situation when plenty of hardware manufacturers are able to code them.

Then you reel off the same stupid list that you repeatedly cite to show that 'M$ am bad' which has been debunked a hundred times by Windows and Linux users alike.

Your final sentence is a gem that sums up the rest your post: "Windoze is like barren". What does that even mean?

"...it should be simple to find ANYTHING that was added to either one."

While it might not always have been simple, it was at least in theory possible to find anything installed on a computer prior to hardware virtualization technologies being introduced. The crux of this new challenge is that the newer chips from Intel and AMD have support for cpu-based virtualization. In other words, they implemeted some of the hard parts of VMWare in the processor itself.

With one of these newer processors, the host operating system on a machine can prepare one of the CPU for a guest operating system to run in a virtual session. When the guest operating system issues an interrupt to interact with hardware, say to read a block off of the hard drive, then the processor would let the host operating system handle the request transparently to the guest operating system rather than letting the hardware itself process the request. This means that if someone could install a malicious virus in the place of the host operating system and have it run your OS as the guest operating system, then it should, in theory, be impossible for your guest operating system to detect the virus.

Perhaps another way of stating it is that the virus isn't actually added to the "machine" that the operating system runs in; the virus is actually added to a host machine outside of the one the operating system runs in. This is why this type of attack is referred to as a "blue pill" attack. That name references the premise of the Matrix movies where the world that people thought they lived in was just a virtual world being hosted by a malicious "host world" in which other entities were taking advantage of the humans in the virtual world without their knowledge.

Fantastic, but my point is that if he's using AMD64, where 64-bit code really is at least as fast as 32-bit code, then 'long' really is quite large. This document indicates that "int" is 4 bytes and "long" is 8 bytes.

Keep in mind that Theo is speaking theoretically here, about potential vulnerabilities -- there are no actual working exploits for this stuff in the wild, and if/when there are, you'll hear about them through normal security advisories and Intel will probably release microcode updates to fix them, just like they did with this TLB bug when it proved to be a real-world problem.

There may be (in fact, probably are) workable exploits known to the ultra-secretive intelligence organizations of the world, but for most people that's not a concern -- you're unlikely to be the target of an individualized attack, and if you are, you'd better have your computer watched 24/7 by some highly-paid armed guards, because it's much cheaper and easier to just break in and use your computer directly than to pull off an attack based on buggy CPU opcodes.

Also keep in mind that AMD's processors aren't bug-free either: their errata list is here.

Everybody publishes errata. AMD's are at: http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white _papers_and_tech_docs/25759.pdf (starting on page 12)

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoo m/0,,51_104_543_5730~32703,00.html

AMD made sure that (of all things) NetBSD ran on the K8 architecture 18 months before engineering samples were available.
What do you want from them? They just bought ATI and frankly their software development team was a mess, AMD is just beginning to untangle that.

Top result on google for "amd compiler" is...

http://www.amd.com/epd/desiging/fusionpartners/pro dbytype/3.developme/11.compiler/index.html

list of 3rd party software from the era of Win98/NT, just a little out of date.

Perhaps because AMD owns ATI? http://ati.amd.com/

If this was anyone but twitter posting, I'd be asking if he had too much to drink.

Surface [Video] When this Vista tech hits the home market, it is going to be big. Surface makes interaction with the PC a social experience. more open and more casual than the Wii controller.

In the near term, there is Windows Home Server. HP MediaSmart Server Brand name product. No assembly required...

And so we return to reality. Heathkit died in the 'eighties. The home PC market is not a craft market. No one wants to deal with the assembly and configuration issues of systems this complex.

There are already designed-for-Vista systems on the market that upstage the generic XP box. HP TouchSmart IQ770 PC Review. There will be more to come. Products like ATI's CableCARD HDTV Digital Cable Tuner will eventually have an impact. A system that is realistically spec'd for Vista will be realistically spec'd for HD - whether the source is camcorder video, cable, broadcast, ot the net.

_____

IP laws are not going into the trash so long as audiences expect to see $100 million dollar productions on their 52 inch screen. In the thirties, forties, and fiftues, almost everything in American radio and television was produced by advertising agencies and down to the last detail designed to meet the needs of their mass-market sponsors.

You might want to think about that before you deny creative talents a direct and sustaining source of income.

This site has a lot of pictures (click "AMD Processors and Wafers"). Some of the high-res versions might be CMYK instead of RGB, meaning most browsers won't display them directly. There are also a bunch of pictures from other processors here. In fact, here are the Phenom pictures - just not surrounded by ads.

This site has a lot of pictures (click "AMD Processors and Wafers"). Some of the high-res versions might be CMYK instead of RGB, meaning most browsers won't display them directly. There are also a bunch of pictures from other processors here. In fact, here are the Phenom pictures - just not surrounded by ads.

I am thinking Sim City when I see this

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/Digit alMedia/43263A_hi_res.jpg

Looks like the industry areas are quite big, wonder how the pollution in that city is.

No fires though, so that is a good thing.

In every press release AMD stated it will run in AM2 sockets. If I remember correctly it will not be able to use the new hypertransport links, support for the new power saving functions (it can switch off complete cores if they aren't needed) in AM2 sockets, it will need AM2+ for that. Sorry, I am far too lazy to search for a reference for those last bits of information, it is something I read in a magazine (paper version).