AMD Loses A Corporate Fellow, HSA Expert To NVIDIA

[duby229]

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.

Like I said, the worst case scenario would be that AMD would spin off the GPU division and use the profit to develop a new CPU. Their x86 license along with their IP is worth a lot more than 3.5bil. They aren't going to get bought out.

[b15hop]

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



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



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.



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

Except that Vulcan is going to work on older gen graphics cards as promised... Simply stopping support forces consumers to consider upgrading. No surprise AMD drop support... I switched over to nvidia long ago. At least the 4890 gpu should get good open source support. Nouveau is average to me and KMS should have been a standard 10 years ago.

[dungeon]

Except that Vulcan is going to work on older gen graphics cards as promised...

Until Vulkan specs and drivers are released no one promise anything... always remember that People like simplified speaking and to predict things so to say - "if hardware supports compute shaders, that is it" but there are likely other things

Simply stopping support forces consumers to consider upgrading. No surprise AMD drop support...

No surprise at all, no one advertise forever support and all vendor drop support at some point. Question is just - when it is good time support to be dropped? When it comes to Catalyst driver years are right those 2006/2009/2012, you simply just shave out older chips because it starts to not make sense to support them on new OSes, because those chips does not really meet requirements.

I switched over to nvidia long ago. At least the 4890 gpu should get good open source support. Nouveau is average to me and KMS should have been a standard 10 years ago.

Sooner or later, blobs start to use native things... Nvidia does not used XrandR for many years, but after some time they start... same is with KMS, which is expected in future.

Opensource drivers get those right from the beginning of course... how much, maybe 7-8 years ago

[b15hop]

Until Vulkan specs and drivers are released no one promise anything... always remember that People like simplified speaking and to predict things so to say - "if hardware supports compute shaders, that is it" but there are likely other things



No surprise at all, no one advertise forever support and all vendor drop support at some point. Question is just - when it is good time support to be dropped? When it comes to Catalyst driver years are right those 2006/2009/2012, you simply just shave out older chips because it starts to not make sense to support them on new OSes because those chips does not really meet requirements.

I watched a Vulcan demonstration on Intel hardware. So if a low budget gpu can see HUGE improvements then in theory a high end GPU should have even more. It was nvidia that made promises to support older hardware. But I am betting the cut off point will be the 600 or 700 series nvidia gpu. If they start Vulcan at a new gpu release that may just upset consumers. Maybe AMD are more likely to do that. But only time will tell. For the record I have a 780 gtx and won't be upgrading that for a while... The time a card should be dropped is when games make it well and truly obsolete. Otherwise it would be a shame. I know that my old 4870x2 became obsolete much faster simply due to lack of support. I could tell it was still a fast gpu but no point if new games don't utilise it's gpu power effectively. So it felt like a quick and expensive death for a high end AMD gpu. If I go back to AMD it would be because I have money to burn ...

[dungeon]

Well HD4xxx series is last of generation, HD3xxx second and HD2xxx as first... of course last one user get support dropped sooner then HD2xxx user, but HD4xxx still had being supported for about 3 years

Yeah on expensive chips pain of short support looks like bigger just because they are expensive, but there is not difference less expesive got driver support dropped at same period, because that is how drivers are done - per gen.

So if a low budget gpu can see HUGE improvements then in theory a high end GPU should have even more.

No, it is the same difference expected on API comparison But really depends on app., if it trying to push over more then what budget one can accoplish then well - *that* is what makes difference. But no, API difference should make same percentage difference in ideal scenario across little and more biger chips.

[dungeon]

I watched a Vulcan demonstration on Intel hardware.

Basically they compared single thread GL vs Vulkan, of course difference is tramendious

I watched it too and just laugh , because they don't have threaded GL optimization there... If that was a case there should be virtually no difference in performance, of course Vulkan should do that nearly same thing with less CPU used then threaded GL .

Long story short PC is PC really i am going to play Talos on Playstation 4 now... their GNM API already uses this, nothing can be better then API tailored to exactly One GPU

On the other hand i dunno why PC people traditionaly wants to tailore themselfs to one GPU vendor I mean i know why, but then it is no PC anymore

[nils_]

Like I said, the worst case scenario would be that AMD would spin off the GPU division and use the profit to develop a new CPU. Their x86 license along with their IP is worth a lot more than 3.5bil. They aren't going to get bought out.

You're making my case for me. If you think IP + license is worth more than the company currently costs on the market then it makes absolute sense to buy it - buy AMD, spin out the GPU division, spin out the IP and leave a husk with the debt and licensing deals with the spun out corporations...

[duby229]

You're making my case for me. If you think IP + license is worth more than the company currently costs on the market then it makes absolute sense to buy it - buy AMD, spin out the GPU division, spin out the IP and leave a husk with the debt and licensing deals with the spun out corporations...

it still doesn't make any sense, the lisence would have to go with the husk, so it really it wouldn't be a husk.

[yogi_berra]

AMD is a sinking ship. From the Ars article:

AMD announced its fourth straight quarterly loss?at $197 million?putting total losses for the first nine months of 2015 at $557 million.

[b15hop]

I wonder why AMD has not come out with any exciting new CPU's. I am betting an ARM mobile CPU company may buy them out.