AMD Loses A Corporate Fellow, HSA Expert To NVIDIA

[duby229]

There is just this impression that AMD is a sinking ship, they are shedding their workforce and the stock doesn't look to hot either. May be ripe for takeover, which in the worst case means spinning off ATI and stripping the rest for patents...

I really don't think that'll happen. AMD seems to have a bright future. They have money coming in.

Personally I think we are witnessing a transitional time period. It was really dumb for them to sell their fabs, but Samsung has helped put GF back on track and it seems like only a matter of time now.

EDIT: The only reason things seemed so bad was because there never was a 22nm product and so far no 14nm product. The CMT architecture needed it. It really needed scaled down and GF failed utterly. Now next year Zen will be out and based on a 14nm process. I don't think SMT will help it much or at all. It looks like it has enough integer units to do well on single threaded workloads, but I don't think it will scale as well on multi-threaded workloads. We'll see..

EDIT: I do think Zen will perform pretty good on single threaded loads, but I think a 14nm CMT architecture would blow it away on multi-threaded ones.

[DeepDayze]

hmm... maybe... if nVidia will reach AMDs catalyst driver quality... AMD might just have a chance :-P (jokes aside... i really hope they will!)

Come again? NVidia's driver is the best there is for Linux as Catalyst has been a really sore point for AMD/ATI card owners. Catalyst on Windows was pretty bad and on Linux, worse. NVidia's drivers are quite decent, and overall performance is better than Catalyst. AMD's hardware is good, just the proprietary Catalyst drivers were sucking rather bad.

[dungeon]

Come again? NVidia's driver is the best there is for Linux as Catalyst has been a really sore point for AMD/ATI card owners. Catalyst on Windows was pretty bad and on Linux, worse. NVidia's drivers are quite decent, and overall performance is better than Catalyst. AMD's hardware is good, just the proprietary Catalyst drivers were sucking rather bad.

Someone said that 15 years ago too But not really true, because no matter what ATi AMD devs do with Catalyst (and they improved it all the time) some birds sing same song

[dungeon]

Same for their Linux benchmarks over these years. Oh and how dare do you recommend Catalyst to Linux users? xD

Why not? AMD supports both drivers so do I. Also i was opensource radeon driver user for more then decade, that is fine too... But not really when it came to gaming so wanna more perf in games, Catalyst is there and 2D is acceptible to me...

For OpenCL it is Catalyst obviously, same like that but now something on radeon best side - i can't really recommend Catalyst for video decoding, that part is utterly borked there So if someone wants HTPC of course use radeon there of course

[dungeon]

AMD is definitely a good choice for a budget HTPC (they don't support HEVC encoding/decoding on new cards though) and lightweight daily tasks.

I think they do support it with opensource amdgpu driver.

It might get good enough for CAD/CAE/gaming too if they can deliver high performance drivers and keep up the pace with kernel/xorg-server releases; be it open-source or closed-source, I don't really care as long as it works.

Currently latest kernel and xorg releases work here with Catalyst.

I'm currently using a GTX 960, here are my impressions so far:
- Everything works great as advertised on both Windows 7 and Arch Linux (D3D, OGL, OCL, CUDA, smooth 4k h264/h265/... video decoding, ...)
- The card does have lower power consumption (vs. R9 380), with fans being off most of the time (~idle/load: 30c/60c vs. 50c/80c with 4890, ~30c ambient, both dual-fan ASUS cards)
- Rapid driver releases; I was also surprised to see that they have released Windows 10 drivers for their DX10 generation cards (vs. 4890 which just received a halfa** Windows 8 beta driver and subpar Linux open/closed source drivers during all these years)

Ah you want to mention Windows that is another story, Catalyst support there things as advertised. D3D, OGL, OCL, Mantle, 4K h264/265 decode, FreeSync, CrossFire, Eyefinity, LiquidVR, TrueAudio, DDMA, PowerTune, ZeroCore, HD3D, VSR, FRTC, blah, blah, maybe i missed something - everything

Also Catalyst for Windows also have Rapid^tm driver releases there, i think 15.10 driver was released yesterday

Playing currently The Talos Principle for Playstation 4 - consoles are really "dunno think - just play" gaming Maybe i am a little quilty because PC market is in rose down condition for both AMD or Intel recently

Only thing missing is KMS and Wayland support, which I can live without them, though there is rumors about their support being on the way. Overall, I'm very satisfied with the new card

Of course you can live without them... same way Catalyst and radeon driver users live without what other is currently missing

I don't even dunno why WE opensource communtiy does not write our own custom API for games (or better for anything), so we can use that and blobs should cry

[geearf]

Come again? NVidia's driver is the best there is for Linux as Catalyst has been a really sore point for AMD/ATI card owners. Catalyst on Windows was pretty bad and on Linux, worse. NVidia's drivers are quite decent, and overall performance is better than Catalyst. AMD's hardware is good, just the proprietary Catalyst drivers were sucking rather bad.

You did not get the joke.

jakubo wrote "AMDs catalyst driver quality" not "AMDs catalyst driver GOOD quality", ie he was kidding that if this new hire brings in the Catalyst expertise (ie a negative one) it would bring down the nvidia driver, and then maybe it could be worse than catalyst.
(it's not my joke, I'm just explaining)

[dungeon]

I couldn't find any website mentioning h265 support on 300 series.

Why not this site

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...au-hevc-amdgpu

It has been made possible with third party patches from volunteers like Vi0L0 and AMD gives zero fscks about it.

Only that those patches are mostly taken from Alberto MIlone - Ubuntu Catalyst maintainer beside else and is employeed by Canonical which indeed have connection with AMD

That's why you don't see any sign of Catalyst in official Arch Linux repositories. Hopefully it might change with amdgpu, but sadly it's GCN only and lots of 5/6/7k users are left in cold.

Well, it is winter for half of the world always Catalyst supports officialy RHEL, SuSe and Ubuntu. Unofficially that probably goes down to the Linux from Scratch distro if its user has right libs in place .

You are missing the support quality and user base satisfactions.

I am not god nor whore to satisfy everyone, nor i expect anybody to satisfy me completely That is sentence that any Code of Conduct should have

[duby229]

I am not god nor whore to satisfy everyone, nor i expect anybody to satisfy me completely That is sentence that any Code of Conduct should have

Economics 101 starts with mindshare.

[nils_]

I really don't think that'll happen. AMD seems to have a bright future. They have money coming in.

Didn't hear about that, where's that money coming from? New loan? Share offering?

All I see is a company with a market cap of 1.5B and 2B in debt. That may sound like an attractive takeover target.

[dungeon]

Okay I give up, your logic is unbeatable, no matter how hard I try :P

Well i am trying to be correct as much as i can. Story about god and whore, is story about limit in every man.

To put it simple, if company X wants my money they should provide support and allow me to use the hardware however I like; They shouldn't dictate me how/where/when to use it.

Every company dictate you, how things should be used . It is less of a problem with opensource drivers, but with raised complexity those starts to dictate too

I live in Iran, where an average engineer does have lower income than a guy just flipping burgers in US. When we buy new hardware, we expect atleast 5 years of rock solid support and can't afford a new hardware whenever some random company thinks that hardware is old.

3-5 years is normal user support, from the time where hardware is actually first designed it is around 10 years for the chip gen.

When buying the 4890 (vs. GTX 275) a western friend recommended AMD for being open source friendly, improving the drivers and being innovating at that time; and they really were at that time. Everything was great till AMD dropped support the next year. My friend swapped his 4870x2 with a Fermi based card and I had to live with the 4890 till now. Please don't be that friend to your friends

Western or eastern does not matter... for years now i always point out 3 years per gen support as very minimum that is true. Catalyst drop support for oldest chips every 3 years on average, for some it is virtually extended to 5 years at max. Of course if you want you can use that driver on older Windows much more time then that, but that can't be applied to rolling Linux distros nor to same way to developing versions of Windows

To me it does not make sense, on let say Windows 10 to support anything but DX12 capable chips - really that is about it by design. Simple, ideally people with older hardware should stick with older OS if you buy new hardware then you get new OS... man to man said support for older is really just holding water for enough time