Slashdot Mirror
AMD Banks On Flood of Stream Apps
Slatterz writes "Closely integrating GPU and CPU systems was one of the motivations for AMD's $5.4bn acquisition of ATI in 2006. Now AMD is looking to expand its Stream project, which uses graphics chip processing cores to perform computing tasks normally sent to the CPU, a process known as General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU). By leveraging thousands of processing cores on a graphics card for general computing calculations, tasks such as scientific simulations or geographic modelling, which are traditionally the realm of supercomputers, can be performed on smaller, more affordable systems. AMD will release a new driver for its Radeon series on 10 December which will extend Stream capabilities to consumer cards." Reader Vigile adds: "While third-party consumer applications from CyberLink and ArcSoft are due in Q1 2009, in early December AMD will release a new Catalyst driver that opens up stream computing on all 4000-series parts and a new Avivo Video Converter application that promises to drastically increase transcoding speeds. AMD also has partnered with Aprius to build 8-GPU stream computing servers to compete with NVIDIA's Tesla brand."
There, fixed that for you.
Your mom might have told you that the customer is always right, but that is not actually true. When customers make a nontrivial request a wise manager will do a cost-benefit analysis. Is the gain from fulfilling the customers' request greater than cost of doing so? (Where cost includes direct cost of labor and materials as well as the PR cost of snubbing customers.) Developing and supporting drivers is a lot of work. So is writing and supporting documentation.
AMD did not open-source their Radeon drivers. They released partial specs and left implementing the driver to the X.org community. It seems clear that AMD has put a low priority on supporting the radeonhd project from the slow pace at which updated specs is released for new chips.