Insight Into AMD's Linux Driver Development

Cowards Anonymous writes "It's no secret that ATI Technologies has had a rough time in the past delivering display drivers that met the expectations of their customers. When ATI started out producing a FireGL and Radeon Linux driver they for some time were greatly behind NVIDIA's feature-rich driver. The early ATI Linux driver had lacked essential functionality such as PCI Express and x86_64 architecture support and was also affected by stability and performance problems — not to mention a great deal of bugs."

Comments

Re:Misleading summary title?

[RingDev]

Did AMD replace all of ATI's developers? Did AMD take control of the ATI development systems? Did AMD assume all responsibilities of ATI's driver development?

Yes, AMD owns ATI, I am very much aware of that. But again, what does AMD have to do with this? If the article was about Linux drivers for AMD chipset based mother boards, it would make sense.

-Rick

Re:Misleading summary title?

[RingDev]

Somewhat, at least, not in a business sense. I don't know the details of their agreement, and I would wager a guess that you don't either. Companies buy out other companies every day, and it doesn't change a thing. Sure AMD may have sat down with the heads of ATI and said "We want you to include Linux drivers in your release cycle" but it is still the ATI management that passes those wishes on down. I haven't heard of any mass layoffs or upper echelon retirements from ATI, so I'm guessing that other than a slight reorganization and a few new titles, ATI is virtually the same entity it was prior to AMD's buy out.

And to stay on the original topic, AMD is branded for recognition in processors, ATI is branded for graphics cards. That's why you are still buying an ATI graphics card, NOT and AMD graphics card. Even the new cards being produced are still "ATI Radeon" cards, they just have the AMD logo tossed on the box. I stand by my original statement, the title is misleading. And it'll take a good amount of advertising and re-branding to get AMD's name to be synonymous with ATI's in the realm of graphics cards.

-Rick