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AMD Closes OSRC, Lays Off Several Linux Kernel Developers
From the H reporting on LinuxCon Europe comes news that several Linux kernel developers have been laid off by AMD as part of its workforce reduction. From the article: "OSRC staff primarily worked to develop the Linux support for AMD's server processors, but they also wrote code and extensions for related desktop and notebook CPUs – for example, they looked after the code to support CPU frequency scaling for the PowerNow and Turbo Core technologies. While working on the kernel's IOMMU and KVM support, one of AMD's former employees contributed to the development of the "IOMMU groups" feature that was integrated into Linux 3.6; this feature provides the basis for a new Linux 3.6 technology that allows a host's PCIe devices to be passed through to virtual machines and can also be used with Intel CPUs."
Looks like the group was doing interesting research on hypervisors, lockless data structures, and multi-core synchronization primitives among other things. The Open Source Radeon driver developers are not affected by this at least.
The AMD/ATI linux drivers suck, they are laying off their kernel folks, and no indication they have any plans to change. I hope they survive, but convincing me not to buy your products is not going to help.
The server market, usually Linux-based, appears to be AMD's most stable market. Opterons are very often preferred over Xeons for a variety of reasons. So why exactly would AMD start axing developers in areas related to that? If anything, it'd make more sense to throttle down consumer processors and focus on graphics and server processors, no?
Wish they'd start at the top... just look for the fuckers preparing their golden parachutes and sack them before they can deploy.
AMD is betting the farm on ARM-64. If it fails to take off in the server world, there won't be anything left of the company. Too many cuts and too deep. The worst part of that is that not only would we lose competition in the x86 space, but graphics competition at the high end would also be gone (unless Intel starts working miracles).
This has nothing to do with graphics drivers at all, those were completely unaffected. It might impact implementation of some new server features on Linux, but it is strictly about CPU and related features, not APU or GPU stuff.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I realize that. I only meant they were already crap, so this was basically their only way of making those products less attractive to me.
AMD is betting the farm on ARM-64. If it fails to take off in the server world, there won't be anything left of the company. Too many cuts and too deep. The worst part of that is that not only would we lose competition in the x86 space, but graphics competition at the high end would also be gone (unless Intel starts working miracles).
Is there a good reason Intel doesn't get more serious about graphics hardware? With the fabs and expertise and funding they've got I am convinced they could do it if they wanted to. Why wouldn't they as a company want to expand into this market? Wouldn't it be a way to diversify?
And I mean, the drivers on Linux for intel graphics Just Plain Work. Even more hassle-free than nVidia's linux drivers which are quite good, just of course not bundled with the kernel like almost every other driver.
And no Nouveau sounded nice but just isn't there yet, not if you actually need the performance, tho I sure hope that changes. Some major distros bundling Nouveau as a default driver is just a repeat of the same mistake they made with installing Pulseaudio by default. ESPECIALLY distros aimed at newbies like Ubuntu, hey here's a free tip, newbies aren't so good at isolating and fixing the kinds of problems that causes, they just go back to Windows because Linux "didn't work so good".
And really I hate pulseaudio. If i wanted to play sound over a network I'd share the files via nfs or samba on a local network. Superior in every way. Then I have something generic that can share video, documents, anything. It's *nix man, everything is a file, local or not. And per-app volume adjustment is needless complexity and more stuff to waste time tweaking for no real gain. But I digress.
I wouldn't mind the open source drivers for my AMD video card (HD-6870) but last time I checked (last month) using them constantly kept the fan at full speed. I duel boot into Windows for gaming, so don't need super graphics performance in Linux. I do however, like not to have to wear ear plugs when on my computer. Of course when Valve releases Steam for Linux, I may need more performance in Linux as I migrate my gaming over, but that's another topic.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
I suspect Intel doesn't want to give any more help to GPU processing efforts which are making inroads at obsoleting their main CPU line for large workloads.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Cue the shills to tell us why preferring open source Linux drivers is bad and we should all be happy to run binary blobs on our systems.
As opposed to the shills telling us why the crappy open source drivers should be used?
Run this as root, to turn the fan speed and GPU power to low:
echo low > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile
Further details here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ATI#With_KMS_enabled
More to the point, they have no need to produce better graphics. People who play more than casual games buy a discrete GPU, so they only need to support desktop displays and basic games; about a third of the die in my i7 system is wasted on an IGP I don't use, and I really don't want that situation to become worse in future.
You really should care more about their stock which is 25% of their high.
Time to look at alternatives...
I wish I knew this before buying a quad core A6 laptop, their graphics card driver is abysmal compared to nVidia, which is increasing the performance of their drivers even more.
AMD is doing a very risky bet, the ARM64 has not been well tested in real server workloads, it may as well flop and take the company with it, their opteron line was excellent for virtualization thanks to the many cores, hardware virtualization support and a good performance/price point this new ARM64 has only the low power utilization and low heat as main selling point.
C-x C-c
You really should care more about their stock which is 25% of their high.
I'm guessing you mean their 52-week high? They've had a stock price of over 40 both in 2000 and 2006, since Intel introduced their Core micro-architecture they've lost over 95% of their value.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Thanks! I'll give them another try later today or tomorrow.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
, there won't be anything left of the company.
There's nothing left of the company now, and what is left has the vultures, notably qualcomm, feasting on its remains. The main potentially profitable enterprise from the old AMD was globalfoundries, and that's a separate company now.
AMD is basically just a chip design firm now, they sold their ARM business to qualcomm a couple of years ago (the snapdragon and adreno products), and they are going to struggle to catch back up to the big ARM guys at this point, and the GPU products business will probably be absorbed by someone.
Well if you look at who is at the industrial park at the 407 and Leslie (where ATI HQ is in Markham, just outside Toronto), qualcomm seems to have setup shop, and has a conspicuously large number of job openings for graphics people...
I agree that IGP can be a waste, but why should Intel limit themselves to integrated graphics? AMD seems to have done fine with both discrete and integrated GPUs.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I don't even want to consider how many patents are involved in GPUs these days. Hardware AND Software have probably got to be in the 10s of thousands. If they started to get uppity and make something very good, they'd be blow out of the water in the courts because they couldn't possibly have gotten better without deliberately copying our patents...
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
i have been having a pulse audio problem on my linux box any suggestions for a replacement just use alsa or anything else?
I personally just use ALSA for everything.
I use Gentoo so this system has never had PulseAudio installed (the way Gentoo works, I would only get Pulse by putting it there myself, which I won't).
Ubuntu and most major distributions have wiki pages concerning PulseAudio and how to remove it. Most of the time it's as simple as running a command or two involving your package manager. Binary distros tend to build programs with all features enabled and they simply won't use functionality you don't actually have (for example mplayer on stock Debian complains about not finding LIRC support when run in a terminal but this won't stop playback).
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
How does one go about laying off a hobbyist?
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
That was a point I made to a co-worker. If there's anyone that would be interested in swooping down and grabbing the GPU division, it'd be Qualcomm. They bought AMD's mobile GPU IP for Adreno, no reason for them not to add another feather to their cap and restore the ATi name for a discrete graphics brand, while having all the same knowledge to enhance their mobile GPUs even further.
I just hope that if it happens, Qualcomm doesn't drop all non-Android Linux support.
Is there a good reason Intel doesn't get more serious about graphics hardware?
Well, I'd say that the biggest reason they wouldn't is because then they'd have a problem "explaining" why they use up your CPU die for an IGP. Intel wants your GPU to be something that comes with your CPU, because that's obviously a huge advantage for Intel. That's why they've made real effort to improve Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell promises to take this even further. Reportedly their fastest IGP configuration GT3 is supposed to have 40 EUs compared to 16 in IVB, obviously it's unreleased yet but Intel claims to achieve same FPS on Skyrim at 1920x1080 on high quality as the HD4000 did at 1368x768 on medium quality. They're looking to win over the mass market laptops, the high end graphics cards are increasingly a niche for FPS gamers. There's a lot of WoW addicts that don't need anywhere near a GTX 680 to get their kicks.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I just hope that if it happens, Qualcomm doesn't drop all non-Android Linux support.
hard to say, Qualcomm doesn't seem even remotely interested in the desktop market, but that's what acquisitions are for.
Honest question, how do you get multiple apps doing sound without pulseaudio?
Im pretty hardcore linux user, and I dont know a better option then pulse audio, and it does not crashes on me, it is a little PITA on first install, but after that it works great for me, maybe I am lucky? ( currently using it on a dell laptop, asus lapto, and amd desktop)
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Sell! Seriously! AMD still has a small base of HPC clients who discovered that, due to the work of the people who have just been laid off, Bulldozer actually performs pretty well on recent Linux kernels - much better than any mainstream (windows-based) benchmark would indicate. This small base probably contributes significantly to AMD not being bankrupt yet. With the current move, AMD's basically conceding the x86 market and making a reckless bet on ARM64.
You have always been able to get multiple apps doing sound. You've just not been able to individually control the sound levels before. OSSv4 allows you to do this too.
in windows you can have high(er) power and low fan (if the processing unit is cool enough). with what you're suggesting, you lower noise by throwing performance out of the window (speaking from experience). on low setting, i can't even scroll webpages smoothly. amd's drivers are just sad.
The AMD/ATI linux drivers suck, they are laying off their kernel folks, and no indication they have any plans to change. I hope they survive, but convincing me not to buy your products is not going to help.
AMD is the only choice in my mind. Intel is big and evil monopolist who hates consumers , and Nvidia hates Linux and OpenSource.
AMD is the only alternative to these goons in the PC market.
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Competition in terms of price? Possibly. But competition to push the envelope in terms of performance? I thought game makers pushed hardware makers to innovate?
For real, that is totally not my experience, just one app will work, any other simultaneous app trying to send sound would lose the ability to until the working one is killed and sometimes a restart of both apps is required
This must be related to sound card model I guess, but I have never been able to do multiple apps with plain OSS or ALSA
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