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AMD Releases Open Source Fusion Driver

Posted by kdawson on from the knock-yourselves-out dept.

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."

8 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Time to move away from NVidia now? by erroneus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Time to move away from NVidia now? by hedwards · · Score: 4, Insightful

      nVidia is the last man standing in a sense. Both Intel and ATI (Obviously now owned by AMD) have released or are releasing pretty much everything necessary to have native drivers for whatever OS one wants to use. At some point they'll likely give up on that as more and more geeks decide that they don't want to recommend something that's limited like that.

      Not so much with cutting edge gaming rigs, but with older computers especially it's fairly common for video cards to outlive their manufacturer support and still contain a few bugs or optimization problems.

    2. Re:Time to move away from NVidia now? by diegocg · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Time? You are late. ATI has been releasing specs and employing engineers to write opensource drivers for some time already. I haven't bought a Nvidia GPU for years, and I have no plans to do it in the future.

  2. Re:When AMD turns to 28nm production... by hedwards · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One of the complaints I've had about Apple was that they don't have any products at all that use AMD chips. Not really a deal breaker, but I prefer AMD because for as long as I can recall they've had the best performance for the price. Sure Intel is almost always faster, but just about anybody can if their not worried about price.

  3. Re:When AMD turns to 28nm production... by ifiwereasculptor · · Score: 4, Funny

    And you think Apple customers are that worried about price?

  4. Ontario Processor? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  5. Re:Fusion by RightSaidFred99 · · Score: 4, Informative

    huh?

    Double huh?

    It's rare to read someone post something both factually and subjectively wrong at the same time in so few words. Congratulations.

  6. Re:When AMD turns to 28nm production... by C_Kode · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And you think Apple customers are that worried about price?

    Apple customers are going to pay a premium no matter what. It's Apple that wants the discount. The less Apple pays for the hardware, the larger the margin they get with each product. Apple's customers aren't going to see any discount, even if Apple's discount is $100 per processor to move to AMD.

    Apple has $50B in the cash. Considering what they sell, that's an absurd amount of money. Enough to buy Sony outright. It just goes to show you the enormous margins that consumers pay for Apple products. It's like Sun / Oracle / Cisco in the 90s except these are consumers that are paying the outrageous margins rather than large money-fat corporations.