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AMD Releases Open Source Fusion Driver
An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday AMD released open source Linux driver support for their Fusion APUs, primarily for the first Ontario processor. As detailed on Phoronix, this includes support for kernel mode-setting, 2D acceleration, and 3D acceleration via both Mesa and Gallium3D graphics drivers."
Aren't too many Phoronix news lattely ? Are they on sale ?
core2 is dieing intel's next on board video is at nvidia 9400m level but it also locks out better on board video.
Some of apple systems may not fit in a full X16 pci-e video chip.
Apple is may use i3 / i5 cpu with a added ati or nvidia chip. But they don't like to use add in video in there low end systems.
IIRC, Fusion is aimed more at smartphones, tablets and maybe netbooks/nettops. A Core 2 Duo / nVidia 320M should still be significantly more powerful. They were once planning a desktop-grade processor, but that seems to have been cancelled.
Any chance Apple could use that for the next versions of Mac mini and MacBooks? Or is a Core 2 Duo with nVidia 320M still better than Fusion?
... according to Fudzilla.com
http://www.fudzilla.com/notebooks/item/20888-amd-apple-deal-is-28nm-notebooks
"Fusion goes Apple 28 / 32nm
It all started here, when AMD’s Senior VP and Chief Sales Officer Emilio Ghilardi was brave enough to show an image of several Apple products in a Fusion presentation. After we wrote our part AMD was quick to deny it, perhaps a bit too quick, which gave us a reason to dig some more, only to find that we were on the right track.
We asked around and some sources close to Intel / Nvidia have denied the rumour saying that they know nothing about it. However, just a day later we managed to confirm that the leak is real and that Apple will indeed use Fusion, here.
Our industry sources have indicated that the deal will be announced in at some point 2011, that it will involve 28nm and 32nm Fusion parts particularly Krishna and that Apple plans to launch notebooks based on AMD chips. Apple is also not cold hearted on Trinity 32nm Fusion parts.
The announcement can be as far as a year away, as 28nm parts won't materialise until the second half of 2011 and since AMD doesn’t have a tablet chip, it won’t happen in iPad segment. At this point Apple doesn’t plan to use any AMD chips in desktop or server parts, but in case Bulldozer impresses us all, maybe Steve might change his mind.
So if you like Apple and love AMD, start saving money as roughly a year from now you should be able to buy Apple notebook with Fusion Krishna / Trinity class APU."
And if you want Fusion benchmarks, check the usual suspects:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/19981
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4023/the-brazos-performance-preview-amd-e350-benchmarked
Fusion is going to be important. AMD will finally have a portable product that rivals Intel. Integrated video hardware is now commonplace on the desktop. Embedded AMD hardware is beginning to appear and Fusion will accelerate this.
Intel doesn't have a 3D core they can integrate onto the CPU die. Bottom line is AMD has an edge.
Long ago, I went with ATI video because it had the best support for Linux. Eventually, NVidia caught on to this trend and started supporting Linux too... and better than ATI. So I switched. Now NVidia has screwed the community that had helped it to grow in popularity by putting out "Optimus" hybrid graphics everywhere and then refusing to update their Linux drivers to support it and refusing to release any details about it either. So now, the best anyone had been able to do is disable the nvidia GPU to reduce power consumption in laptops not able to utilize the nvidia hardware.
As AMD/ATI is doing this, perhaps my next selection will be to the exclusion of NVidia (again).
When will these jerks ever learn? The future of computing is in embedded devices and those devices will run Linux. Get Linux developers using YOUR hardware and it will have a better shot at a prosperous future as well. So far, Intel and ATI are the only options.
Drivers that finally enable full capability of the hardware are a must, be that OSS or closed source.
nVidia has a long term support in their Linux drivers - they are the same as their Windows or OS X drivers, just added a GPL glue layer. Are the AMD drivers going to be long term supported too? Stable??
To me,
stable > long term support >>> OSS > closed-source
only because I'm not planning on debugging video drivers!
I think there was some speculation that it could be used alongside the main GPU as in some of the newer multicard ones. Basically to do things like calculating what things are visible so that the processor doesn't have to send those over the bus. Normally the GPU itself does that after the data goes over the wire, doing it on chip would be a lot cheaper, and probably quite doable if you've got another chip that ends up doing most of the rest of the work. I suspect that they'll find a way of adding that sort of flexibility.
I'm not sure if that's something which AMD has any designs on, though I'd be shocked if they weren't.
The word is that they are seriously considering it at least. (And "the word" is the best you get when discussing Apple)
I went to buy an Ontario processor, but cheaped out -- I ended up with a Quebec processor. Now, I can't understand a thing it says, it never seems to do anything, and I keep having to give it money!
Wait, I thought fusion was still (perpetually) a few decades away from viability.
Basically to do things like calculating what things are visible so that the processor doesn't have to send those over the bus.
Calculating occlusion requires knowing where the points are relative to the camera's line of sight, which requires running the vertex shaders first. How much of a speed boost would result from running the vertex shaders on an on-die GPU and delegating pixel shading to the discrete GPU? I'd imagine that pixel shaders, which are run for each pixel, need a lot more time than vertex shaders.
Ontario ones are better then the cheap china ones.
Originally computers were huge proprietary things.
Now they are small and commonplace.
In the past software was written to a specific hardware, now it's not ( C is cross platform compared to assembly, folks ).
Games no longer draw graphics by directly reading and writing raster data directly into hardcoded "video memory" regions.
Abstraction layers (such as a graphics API + Drivers) are a must in todays software environment. Why? To support cross platform software development. Many of todays games sit on top of another huge abstraction layer The Game Engine (such as Unreal or Source), and in doing so are more easily ported to multiple platforms.
The point is: Software development is rapidly moving from "Works on only one hardware/software platform" to "Works on many platforms, OSes, devices, etc". Eventually we will get to the point where any software can run on just about any hardware. The fast track to this destination is clearly Open Source. It's ridiculous to me to see hardware drivers lagging behind in the cross platform aspect when compared to cross platform open source projects like Firefox, Apache server, etc.
Additionally: An open source driver could have a few #ifdef blocks, etc, and compile/run on both Linux and Windows platforms (ok, more than a few, but why not release the source at least and get some free help?). The damn driver is not the product; The hardware is the product being sold. More platforms = more customers; no other argument really compares.
I'm glad to see ATI has seen a bit of the big picture. Now, if only we can get NV to realize that cross platform / OSS is good for everyone (including customers -- less vendor lock in).
There's still a niche that isn't very well served, where these low-power Fusion CPUs appear they could kick some major ass: the always-on-24/7 lightly-loaded server. I'm currently using Athlon II xxxe for this, but I'd happily downgrade processing power in exchange for lower wattage.
Shit, Atom would be good enough, if the motherboards had enough SATA ports or slots for me to add SATA cards, but I never found any that did. Gimme a 9W or 18W processor on a board that I can somehow hook up 8 drives to, and that'll be my new mythbackend. If commflagging or transcoding takes a little longer, I just don't care; Atom 330 is nearly good enough for that that anyway, and it looks like Fusion is better than Atom in every way.
I'd think just about every home or office would need at least one box like this, but according to the market, I'm wrong. WTF?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Unfair comparison: The Android phone is also a phone. You should be comparing equivilent products: An Android phone vs the iPhone.
I'm not sure about Android portable media players, but there are tablets that could be regarded as equivilent in intended use to an iPad.
That's the same argument fanboys always use to call Apple products cheaper. Hand pick your specific criteria the must be included (app store) and excluded (and actual phone . . .) until you get just the right oddball combination of features that you can call it cheaper.
Meanwhile, when you compare the iPod Touch to other touch-screen media players, it's pricing is atrocious, and Apple's laptops, desktops, and servers all fair equally poorly against their general competitors.
As a matter of fact the only segment in which Apple competes well on price is with iPhone. It's about the same as other similar smartphones. Other than that though? You're definitely paying your turtleneck-tax.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I've not got a 5850, but a close ATI card. I found that the drivers ubuntu installed were unstable and quite awkward in multi-monitor configurations, but the ones that I got straight from the ATI site worked very nicely. They are the same basic software, right down to the control panel layout, but the ones on the site are a few revisions further along and it shows. At least in the multi-monitor area.
I'm not sure about Android portable media players, but there are tablets that could be regarded as equivilent in intended use to an iPad.
In order for your objection to be carried you are going to have to show that there's Android-based media players with an app store which are also otherwise comparable to the iPod Touch and/or iPad. So far tablets don't have app store access. Perhaps in Gingerbread, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Last time I specced an Apple desktop vs any others is was the cheapest.
It had to be compared to workstations. As there were no other brands matching Apple's in the desktop range.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
when you compare the iPod Touch to other touch-screen media players, it's pricing is atrocious
What other touch screen media players can I try in stores, even those without an app store?
Archos, Zune, etc.. There are other little guys in the market as well, but I can't remember them off the top of my head. Archos has pegged on Android, so they'll probably get app store access and Zune is tied to the Microsoft ecosystem for better or worse.
Bye!
You don't need to handpick criteria in order to make Apple products seem cheaper. All you really need to do is include some criteria other than clock speeds and memory capacities. Geeks have a tendency to ignore advantages that aren't trivially quantifiable, even when those advantages have real monetary value to most consumers.
When you look at Apple's product line, you find that many products have no true head-on competitors. Most obvious are the iPod Touch, the iMac, and the Mac Mini. Those are products that clearly have a large market and large margins for Apple, so you would expect there to be some competitors trying to undercut Apple while matching them for features and capabilities. Instead, what you see are companies that try to undercut Apple by offering products that have significant disadvantages, such as ultra-small form factor PCs that only offer Atom processors and crappy Intel graphics, while still being bigger than the Mac Mini, or slightly larger boxes that are as fast or faster than an iMac, but when you add in the price of a good monitor, it ends up being several hundred dollars more expensive than the iMac, while lacking the convenience and not really offering much more in the way of upgradeability.
The only reasonable way to explain this is that all would-be Apple competitors lack either the engineering talent or the scale necessary to compete head-on with Apple's offerings. But if that's the case, then the "Apple tax" is no longer arbitrary - it is supported at least in part by very narrow and apparently natural monopolies Apple has in some niches.
Last big announcement about an AMD code drop, there was still something missing, though I don't remember what. Features, performance, whatever, there was still something not there that was either present in proprietary AMD drivers or nVidia drivers.
Are we past that yet? Is it finally time to dump nVidia for AMD?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As I understand it the android market is not a requirement for installing apps.
Why try it in a store? Buy it online and if you do not like it return it.
Welcome to the 21st century.
See Archos: Their tablets and media players run Android, some even include dual OS features to run Linux on them. They run on Cortex A8 processors.
Funny. Last time I bought a PC, the cheapest Apple option for my needs was the most expensive iMac. It would have cost twice what I paid, and performed worse. Apple simply isn't competitive in the midrange.
Just looked at their prices too, they've gotten worse.
And the crappy displays on the iMacs (maybe this has improved) kill them for serious use, leaving the cheapest desktop at $2500, and it's only one CPU.
But trying to match their 5k computer at Dell runs 6k.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Let me know when I can buy a GPU where every single feature of the card (INCLUDING the on-board dedicated circuitry for decoding video) can be used in the open source drivers and then maybe I will care...
Buy it online and if you do not like it return it.
And pay how many 15% restocking fees?
Archos has pegged on Android, so they'll probably get app store access
Any evidence of that? Archos has had Android media players out for years, but none have Android Market access. Archos even set up its own "AppsLib" store out of frustration with Google not opening up Android Market to devices other than telephones. But as far as I know, the selection on AppsLib is nowhere near that of Android Market.
As I understand it the android market is not a requirement for installing apps.
It is if the publisher of the application that you want to use has decided not to make it available other than through Android Market. I imagine this to be the case especially with paid apps that have no close freeware substitute.
Hey scrub, Fusion is the same size as intel's onboard video. RTFA.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Their tablets are uniformly poorly reviewed compared to Apple's offerings and the battery life is not even in the same ballpark.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Archos 70 boasts better battery life than the iPad, might be time to update that info there. The Atom based tablets are of course going to have worse battery life but when you're talking about using the same processor you're going to have a hard time making that argument plausible.