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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 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.
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
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
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...
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