AMD Develops New Linux Open-Source Driver Model

An anonymous reader writes "AMD privately shared with Phoronix during GDC2014 that they're developing a new Linux driver model. While there will still be an open (Gallium3D) and closed-source (Catalyst) driver, the Catalyst driver will be much smaller. AMD developers are trying to isolate the closed-source portion of the driver to just user-space while the kernel driver that's in the mainline Linux kernel would also be used by Catalyst. It's not clear if this will ultimately work but they hope it will for reducing code duplication, eliminating fragmentation with different kernels, and allowing open and closed-source driver developers to better collaborate over the AMD Radeon Linux kernel driver."

Comments

Good for them

[Ynot_82]

Seems AMD have taken on-board what Nvidia chose to ignore.
Being the advice offered by the Kernel devs

http://lists.linux-foundation....

Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Lower power consumption in better CPUs. Why choose AMD?

Re:Intel

[Rich0]

Hell, a 40$ APU from AMD beats anything Intel has to offer for almost twice as much, not to mention that even at that price the AMD has a decent GPU while the Intel has none at all.

This is why I think AMD tends to be represented more in the DIY arena. Companies like Dell don't want to sell you a $150 CPU+motherboard upgrade. They want to sell you a $1200 PC. If you're going to throw away your old case, PSU, video card, RAM, hard drive, DVD drive, etc - then you might as well spend an extra $200 on the CPU.

On the other hand, if you're only upgrading CPU+MB, and maybe RAM, then AMD makes a lot more sense. If my options are to spend $500 every 6 years on an Intel CPU+MB, or $150 every other year on an AMD CPU+MB, then I'll take the latter. I'll actually spend less money, and for most of the time I'll have a better system. Sure, the Intel system will outperform the AMD system in years 1-2, but the AMD system will outperform in years 3-6, and by a huge margin in the last two years. A CPU is a rapidly-depreciating asset, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend a lot of money going high-end - you're far better off buying something moderate and replacing it more often. Then Moore's Law will work for you, and not against you.

Re:Intel

[ArchieBunker]

And a midrange i5 CPU will beat AMD's top of the line FX-8350, so what is your point? Both of those cost the same.

Re:Intel

[hairyfeet]

What you fail to mention is the fact you could have probably built most if not all of an AMD 6 core system for the cost of the i7-860 alone, and if one were to go one notch down to the quads (which lets face it software just hasn't kept up with hardware and even more triple cores spend more time at idle than under load) then one could have easily built the entire system. The 8 cores were built just to say they could and frankly have never been priced competitively, no different than those 5Ghz chips they released not too long ago.

My oldest boy has an AMD hexacore, 8Gb of RAM, a 1Tb HDD and an HD7750, the whole system ended up costing something like $375 after MIRs. It kicks ass at gaming, transcoding, hell it'll do anything your average user will be able to think up for a PC to do and do so quite well and cost a grand total of $70 more than your i7-860 BY ITSELF without so much as a stick of RAM or anything according to Intel.

So if you want to sit here and argue that you are one of the 1% that actually NEED every MHz of speed you can get, which until we see benches done that are compiled with GCC I wouldn't trust the benches BTW but that is a different story, then fine, do so. But the bang for the buck is so far in AMD's camp right now it isn't even funny, you can choose from several quad cores including fully unlocked for less than a Pentium Dual, and if all you care about is power the AMD Jaguars spank the Intel Atoms on performance while using less than 25w for a quad. AMD is just a crazy deal ATM which is why I've had no complaints when it comes to being AMD exclusive, the customers get great performance at a great price.

Re:Does AMD still matter?

[cbhacking]

Well, both of the high-performance current-gen game consoles use AMD. On that basis alone, they're quite unlikely to go anywhere.

Re:Why, oh why?

[EvanED]

Well, here's the thing... to at least a moderate extent, Intel isn't really competing against AMD or nVidia, because unless something has changed relatively recently, they don't have anything that comes even close to the offerings of the latter in terms of performance. So if AMD or nVidia learns something about how Intel chips works and improves their own a bit as a result, they're not going to take away much business from Intel. On the other hand, if AMD open-sourced the guts of their driver and nVidia learned enough to raise the performance of their own cards by a few percentage points or something, that'd be a somewhat big deal.

The complement to this argument is that because Intel can't win customers based on performance, they have incentive to seek other distinguishing factors. One of those factors would be openness and Linux support.