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The Letter That Started AMD's Open-Source Strategy
An anonymous reader writes "In marking the fourth anniversary of AMD's open-source strategy for their Radeon graphics, Phoronix has published the letter that launched this open-source effort. It was a letter written by Novell SUSE X engineers and submitted to AMD management with their open-source proposal."
And yet 4 years later their open sores driver sucks more donkey dicks than a woman in a tijuana donkey show.
...a non-free firmware blob is required to use those drivers. Can we really call them free?
Guys, it's Sunday. Don't you have something better to do than spread the Hate? Isn't there a pond where you can go fishing? You give no specifics. You give no test criteria. The best I see is an insulting reference to obsolete hardware.
Why not be more constructive? How about create some kind of automated test of driver + hardware to evaluate drivers and hardware? Why not set up a database of known hardware that works/doesn't work? How about contributing code to graphics drivers?
All I see is an article talking about the letter, where's the actual letter?
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
I believe there was also support for opening the then acquired ATI wares from inside AMD. A former KGI/GGI Project developer (along with fellow AMD employees) were pushing for AMD to open the specifications to ATI's hardware.
To ensure an open development process NOVELL would require that it will not make use of any specifications or programming documentation that can not be made available to other developers from the open source community also under a suitable documentation publication program which will permit the release of source code under an open source license.
This step will help to ensure continued maintenance for hardware components beyond the maintenance cycle of the manufacturer and will help customer to secure their investment. Furthermore it will demonstrate and underline AMD's full commitment to the open source development model and send a positive signal to the open source community which this has been waiting for for a long time.
NOVELL will ensure that a driver with at least base functionalities is available for earlier releases of the X Window System at least back to X11 R6.9 to be integrated in existing enterprise products by their respective vendors.
The "what have you done for me lately" crowd has an interesting way with words that never fails to amuse me.
Everyone else? There are three horses in this race, and a few ticks hitched to the feathers surrounding the coffin bone. 90% of the cells in the human body are bacterial. Sometimes you have to integrate over quorum.
Intel isn't especially huffed about offloading high-demand computing to a GPU chip manufactured by somebody else. Without somebody else poised to siphon an artery, Intel would do everything in their power to level the field. We would have one coefficient of Moore's law governing performance, rather than two. Generally when you lash two horses together, the slower horse governs the pace.
Fortunately, the GPU swallowed the blue pill before Intel could do much about it. On the side of the fence with the big Cheshire grin, we have precisely two spectral lines of any significance: red and green. But you have to remember that both of these companies exist in an ecosystem where the bully in the china shop hoovers up the vast majority of the resources like the human race arrived on a shiny new continent.
It ain't easy feeding the sourdough culture known as Fab. It's the pudding mix in Sleeper, the plant in Little Shop of Horrors.
If your Fab blows a bubble, you're in a world of hurt. Around this nightmare, you have to knock off some of the most technically demanding design projects known to man, year in and year out. After you build a Saturn V, everyone wants a Saturn VI. The Saturn VI blows everyone away--for a year or two--then everyone starts to itch and scratch for a Saturn VII.
Back when the original Saturn V was crawling toward heaven at a top speed of 1mph, who exactly was "everyone else"? But let's not give the Americans any credit for trumping anyone else.
The painful truth here is that if you love open source, sometimes you have to settle for second best. AMD is slowly making good on the promise of taking this track, although it's truly frightened to think of how much oxygen has boiled off in their seemingly perpetual state of launch readiness. It ain't called Fusion for nothing.
At the bottom of the process this is an IP issue. Some people seem to think that open source happens in Wikileak time frames. It could work that way, but billion transistor designs would really stress out your onion router, and customs might seize your next mask set.
I played a chess game not long ago where I settled into the Siberian Winter defense. In other words, my opponent was better than me, but he fired his powder a moment too soon.
I was boxed in by the mate threat, and his mate threat was boxed in by my passed wing pawn on the other side of the board. If his quill armada didn't crush me first, my winter pawn would crush him later.
If you're asking "what has AMD's wing pawn done for you lately" I suppose the answer is that it sits there doing not very much.
In my case, not very much won me the game after 10 rounds of desperately accurate counter-parries.
Three cheers for the winter pawn.
http://lifehacker.com/assets/resources/2007/05/binder-clip-cablecatcher.jpg
Binder clips are absolutely awesome for the workspace. Get big enough ones to clip onto the desk, route the cable through the uppermost lever. No losing female cable ends again.
DON'T BUY FROM ATI enemy of your freedom
That picture is looking sillier and sillier as time goes on.
ATI has great quality hardware, but lower quality drivers/software. Nvidia it is the opposite.
I switched from Nvidia to ATI for this reason. My ATI 5750 does run Beryl suprising well. I game only on Windows 7 and I doubt performance would be good in Linux, but that can change. If ATI could get good quality drivers for Linux we would be happy to support them. The specs and code open are cryptic and only cover what appears to be a dispatcher which then transmit the code to the different parts of the GPU according to other posters here.
It is not like we are going to compete agaisnt ATI with trade secrets unless one of us has a 1 billion dollar chip fab plant.
Intel opened their speced and it helped them tremendously. Now since ATI has great integration with their bulldozer and Llamo chips new innovations would help sales. We could even improve the drivers to the point where some of the code can be contributed back to their team who develops drivers for Windows.
I have noticed that World of Warcraft runs slower in DirectX 11 vs DirectX 9 which is odd and points to the drivers needing work as Nvidia users get a 20% performance increase. Opening will help.
http://saveie6.com/
They're not trying to keep average Joe out of the GPU manuf. industry, they're trying to keep Chinese companies who already manuf. chips at TSMC from having the code to the drivers. The chinese already have the complete hardware design of the chip, but its worthless without the huge investment in driver design because the two go together like peas and carrots. Good closed source drivers may be one of the few things that prevents rich chinese companies from entirely taking over the GPU market.