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nVidia Posts First Linux Graphics Drivers for Opteron
Brian Stretch writes "nVidia posted the first publically available Linux graphics drivers for the Athlon 64 (aka Hammer series) on their website today. There are updates for the lesser x86 and IA64 architectures as well. Now, if only the Athlon 64 and Opteron boards and CPUs themselves were publically available, or is AMD's developer program sending out more of these things than I know? (If so, gimme!) I guess I'll have to tough it out with my mere dual Athlon 2400+ workstation for now (heh heh heh)."
In related news, an anonymous reader writes "The new AMD Opteron servers designed by Newisys are using embedded Linux for system management. This allows remote management via web browser or ssh to examine processor state, switch power on/off, regulate processor power states and fan speeds, update BIOS firmware, etc. See the docs for more info!"
However, if you want to possibly commit libel while accusing someone else of it, go right ahead, I won't stop you.
And I think there's some value in being first to do something, regardless of the licensing status or any other factors.
"Yeah, whatever, first space satellite... but they were COMMIE BASTARDS!" <-- sour grapes
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
To clarify AMD's processor naming scheme for those who haven't been keeping up with the Joneses, the Athlon 64 is AMD's 64-bit desktop and mobile CPU, while the Opteron is AMD's 64-bit server and workstation CPU. Both utilize the x86-64 architecture, which is essentially an extension of the existing x86 instruction set for 64 bits.
A few key differences between the two are that the Opteron will be multiprocessor-enabled and have three HyperTransport pipes (each providing a theoretical 6.4GB/s of throughput) versus one in the Athlon 64. The Opteron will also have more on-die L2 cache (1MB and 2MB are being talked about right now), and will draw quite a bit more power (90W+ vs. ~65W for the Athlon 64).
They are not the first. I saw at least one Opteron-based 1U system running XFree in the AMD booth at SC2002, just a few weeks ago. No idea what the video/driver subsystems were like (maybe fbdev?).
Wouldn't be surprised if this was the first x86-64 driver to support hardware accelleration though.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
binary-only drivers for cards they won't release specs to
Whinge.
They can't. There is IP involved they don't own, both from S3 and SGI.
Not that this hasn't been said everytime some jackass whined about the same thing. And not that it'll help morons like you who don't have a clue how business works understand this little concept.
this question is asked (and answered) in just about every nvidia related article that comes up on /., so I'll summarize. There are bits and pieces of their drivers which they do not own the rights to (ex. S3TC compression). Also, most of the bang for their video cards comes from the drivers, and they don't want to just give that away. Did you ever notice every time someone shows a benchmark with an ATI card faster than a nvidia card, nvidia releases new drivers with "25%" permformance increases!?!? The whole damn card must be software, since this new driver was larger than the rest of my kernel!
They said the first public release of thier drivers. Past instances of SC have generally shown future work (as in beta stuff), not current tech. I'm willing to bet that there are other graphics drivers from other vendors that are still internal.
Plus if you don't know what video/driver subsystem how do you know it was not nvidia (and hence, still the first)?
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it