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Anand Tours ATI and NVIDIA
logicalstack writes "The folks over at AnandTech have written an
expose on their visits
to both ATI and NVIDIA. Interestingly enough ATI's facility shrouded in secrecy and NVIDIA's is quite open, Including full color pictures of their server farm, and a pic of the NV30 test machine the 'Ikos.' The CEO even showed off the old school NV1 with 1MB of ram!"
Try reading the article:
ATI imposed very strict restrictions on photographs during our visit to their offices in Thornhill, Ontario; we saw a lot of interesting things at ATI's offices (including the foundation for their fountain of fire in the lobby of their main building) but we weren't able to take pictures of most of them. On the other hand, ATI sat us down with one of their chip architects and we were able to get a wealth of information about how their GPUs were made.
NVIDIA wasn't able to set us up with any engineers for an extended period of time (although lunch with Chief Scientist, David Kirk is always informative) but they were much more lax on the picture front so we were able to bring you more of the behind the scenes from NVIDIA.
ATI just didn't want anybody taking pictures, but they were the one sharing the real information.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
ATI was the company that provided the in depth talk with a chip engineer. With NVIDIA, Andtech had to settle to having lunch with their lead architect. NVIDIA was okay with pictures, but ATI was the one that provided real information.
"Old man yells at systemd"
But they work find for the majority of the people that use them. I'm not saying their drivers are perfect, but I'd be willing to bet that the nearly all the people complaining of them crashing are having problems with something else.
I'm glad you could publish your drivers under the GPL, but not everyone is and I'd rather have closed drivers that work well for me than no drivers at all.
Hear hear! And why walk with *two* legs when we clearly only need one!
I don't get it. I'm all for Open Source, but I'm even *more* for a company taking an active interest in supporting their hardware under Linux. I've got a GEForce2 on my system and the drivers are *sweet*. Full support of *all* the hardwares features. How often do you get that under Linux? Not to mention the fact that the drivers compare nicely with their Windows counterparts.
Why spend the same amount of money for hardware that has less support and will effectively run slower because of it? I just don't get it...
If every hardware company were like NVidia we would have far less trouble buying a new printer/modem/videocard/etc.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
It's not nearly that simple.
NVIDIA cards are unlike anything you've ever seen on the inside. It's not a simple matter of register banging like most hardware. And yes, there is quite a bit of proprietary/trade secret stuff in there, such that publishing the driver source or opening the hardware interface would be detrimental to NVIDIA.
As much as we all hate it, the tech industry is largely driven by trade secrets, patents, and lawsuits. I don't think anyone at NVIDIA really likes that, but it's the only way to survive given the broken state of IP laws in the world.
-John (having contributed to the driver)