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AMD Overhauls Open-Source Linux Driver

Posted by Soulskill on from the added-support-for-individual-tree-leaf-motion-and-rump-physics dept.

An anonymous reader writes "AMD's open-source developer has posted an incredible set of 165 patches against the Linux kernel that provide support for a few major features to their Linux graphics driver. Namely, the open-source Radeon Linux driver now supports dynamic power management on hardware going back to the Radeon HD 2000 (R600) generation. The inability to re-clock the GPU frequencies and voltages dynamically based upon load has been a major limiting factor for open-source AMD users where laptops have been warm and there is diminished battery power. The patches also provide basic support for the AMD Radeon HD 8000 'Sea Islands' graphics processors on their open-source Linux driver."

2 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Still not Stallman-approved. by snarfies · · Score: 5, Informative

    Per http://stallman.org/to-4chan.html:

    "Regarding graphics accelerators for PCs, ATI mostly cooperates with the free software movement, while nVidia is totally hostile. ATI has released free drivers.

    However, the ATI drivers use nonfree microcode blobs, whereas most of nVidia's products (excepting the most recent ones) work ok with Nouveau, which is entirely free and has no blobs.

    Thus, paradoxically, if you want to be free you need to get a not-very-recent nVidia accelerator.

    I wish ATI would free this microcode, or put it in ROM, so that we could endorse its products and stop preferring the products of a company that is no friend of ours."

    This sort of thing gets discussed quite a bit on 4chan's technolo/g/y board. Also, installing Gentoo.

  2. AMD Financials Summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    $2B in debt, $1B cash, lost $600M last year, sales dropped 30% last year. They have no assets (spun off their manufacturing facilities). If the next gen consoles do not sell well because of casual / tablet gaming and potential Apple TV games, AMD will be bankrupt in one year and shuttering in two. Spending money on open source drivers is a long term investment - it's not going to get them an additional $600M in revenue next year (>2M additional graphics cards or >5M systemic wins) when PC sales are on the decline.