AMD Publishes Evergreen Shader Documents

[sylware]

Sorry. I wrote Oracle, but I meant VMware

But hey why not Oracle? If they can find a way to use GPU's for databases, they probably consider buying anything they can get

How knows? They might even buy AMD?

VMware??? But they are software only and too little... or have they a trump card?

[RobbieAB]

VMware??? But they are software only and too little... or have they a trump card?

They are as credible as IBM (who want out of the mainstream hardware market) or Intel (who are extremely unlikely to be allowed to, and who don't need them).

Oracle is a more interesting candidate, as it could form part of an interesting hardware portfolio once the Sun acquisition is completed, but realistically, I suspect nvidia is not going to get eaten up in the near future.

[deanjo]

Yes, I hope you are right. it would be really bad if Intel were allowed to buy nVidia.

Check this blog out.

http://www.cringely.com/2009/12/intel-will-buy-nvidia/

It is very scary, how much Intel is pushing to buy nVidia.

Sorry, but I had to chuckle a bit when you posted a Bob Cringely blog, a man who falsified having a PhD from Stanford. Even Charlie doesn't stoop that low.

[sylware]

They are as credible...

Do they have the money? If not, I don't think they will find angels to lend them money. But there is another one: sony. And that would be very bad for us, since I haven't heard anything positive about open source and sony. The GNU/Linux PS3 support was removed... once somebody tried to program the hardware of the RSX (nvidia) going through the hypervisor. Anyway, running GNU/Linux in an hypervisor on that hardware is a not interesting (a waste I would say). That was doomed rigth at the beginning.

[Hoodlum]

Although I do (and will continue to) bash AMD/ATI for not keeping up with Xorg support - there is a reason I bought a 5770 and it is the same reason I just bought one of their older R300 cards as a replacement for a recently failed nvidia card in an older PC. I appreciate the effort that has (and contnues to) go into the open drivers. I can only hope that a year or two from now we have full opengl 2.0/3.0 support for the majority of ATI cards, that would be truly wonderful.

[kernelOfTruth]

that's great news - AMD/ATI go go go !

I need to set up our old samsung laptop with mobility radeon x600 for my parents and for a long time I reflected about which Ubuntu release to use 8.04 (the stable and fglrx) or 9.10 (opensource driver)

seems the opensource driver has won over already against the proprietary because of its better kernel support and performance in 2D (I hope the dynamic clock gating works too)

that way I can also use newer software like firefox 3.5, openoffice 3 and have a newer kernel with better power saving features and performance + security fixes


Now I'm eagerly waiting for support for my 5770 in the opensource drivers


Thank you very much ATI/AMD

Merry Christmas to you guys over at ATI/AMD and at the forums

[Adarion]

do i need install the opensource driver for downloading the spec of the R800 cards????

What? I think this could more be a problem of a pdf displaying browser plugin. Can you just save as and then use an external xpdf, okular or something to display it?

[bridgman]

Sorry, perhaps I missed something. Where in the document does it say "this document is only to be used for implementing opensource OpenGL drivers" ? The shader core supports DirectX, OpenGL, DirectCompute and OpenCL, and this document will be used as a reference for compute developers as well as graphics developers. The ISA docs are actually written and published by the Stream Computing team inside AMD, and our group writes the graphics-specific documentation.

"are legal" in this context means "are valid", ie "will work". The other settings won't work in Germany either

[Drago]

Bridgman I just want to wish you, and all AMD FOSS team Merry Christmas and to continue excite us, Linux users with the wonderfull work you are doing in the next year. Cheers

[cutterjohn]

erm Larabee has been cancelled some time ago? And about the quality of Intel drivers, have a look at the GMA500. The upcoming Atom N450 "Pine Trail" also comes with a GMA500 derivate, so this silliness isn't going to stop.

In two years time ATI will probably be the only manufacturer left who's able to deliver high-performance graphics with free drivers. I am definitely supporting them and not Intel.

WTF are you smoking? They can't even do that with their own proprietary drivers!

The only half-way decent X drivers that I've ever had were the nVidia proprietary ones, and more to the point th eonly useful GPU drivers I've ever had were nVidia drivers on ANY OS...

Oh, and let's not even talk about their weird OEM arrangements under windoze where they can't publish generic drivers... but then again nVidia and Intel don't compete against their own OEMs...

ATI is a joke, and their spec release is a soporific for linux users who are not institutional users, nothing more. Although I will say that ATI's best hope of survival is to provide OSS drivers since they're dropping arch support like flies...