Intel Mesa Driver Code Working To Split Off Old Broadwell "Gen8" Graphics Code

[NotMine999]

For those of us that do not game and might occasionally run 2160p video at our desktops (the big TV is better for that), this old Broadwell series iGPU works just fine. Thank you very much.

Honestly, I don't need one of those power-hogging discrete GFX cards with those dubious power connectors cuz I just won't demand the level of performance that those cards are designed to support.

Seriously, some of us a just fine with "beer budget tastes ... on a beer budget".

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

amd says hello lmao, they are selling new products on legacy support LOL

The AMD change is definitely worse than this nothingburger. I'm typing this on an "Asus ROG Strix G15 AMD Advantage" (what a mouthful). It was supposed to represent what you could do with a flagship all AMD laptop in 2021/2022. It has a Radeon RX 6800M GPU. The beefy Ryzen 9 5980HX has a Vega 8 iGPU. You can't even install the regular Radeon drivers anymore if you are on Windows. You have to go to the bottom of the release notes and find another link for a different driver build "including Vega and Polaris series graphics support". Those special driver builds weren't obvious when Vega began the retirement process, and people were freaking out because their "flagship" AMD gaming laptop couldn't even install current drivers, and the latest drivers were a hard requirement for some AAA games right at the time of the driver servicing change. It was a shitshow.

[Eirikr1848]

For those of us that do not game and might occasionally run 2160p video at our desktops (the big TV is better for that), this old Broadwell series iGPU works just fine. Thank you very much.

Honestly, I don't need one of those power-hogging discrete GFX cards with those dubious power connectors cuz I just won't demand the level of performance that those cards are designed to support.

Seriously, some of us a just fine with "beer budget tastes ... on a beer budget".

Broadwell laptops still have a bit of Level Zero / OpenCL official compute support. And work with OpenVINO, kinda.

Have been buying these laptops and NUCs up cheap ($20-$70) and giving them to people interested in getting started with machine learning and OpenCL and OpenVINO along with Neural Compute Sticks.

The NUCs support 32GB RAM making these a cheap, easy entry into the Intel and ML development ecosystem.

Dang. Well. Rusticl it is. OpenVINO with rusticl backend will have to do.

[TemplarGR]

Here we go again in Phoronix.... Always the same story.... People complaining about literally non-issues.... They are not dropping support for Broadwell graphics, they just remove them from the mainline driver. It makes sense if the architecture is different enough and old enough that any improvements won't really matter for Broadwell and may introduce regressions instead.

People need to understand, if your hardware is ancient, chances are that most improvements that could be done at the hardware driver level have already been done. It makes no sense at all to keep wasting time testing and maintaining such old hardware, driver development resources are not infinite.

It does NOT mean that your hardware will cease functioning, or that any bugs and security fixes won't keep coming. Of course, for really really old hardware, like 90s hardware, it makes sense to utterly drop it from upstream since it makes no sense at all to use a modern kernel and userland with such old hardware. But for Broadwell, that will not be the case for many more years. Your hardware will probably end in a landfill way before they remove support entirely, and if you keep using Broadwell past even that point, then well, you could keep using the by-then latest upstream release with it....

[Alexmitter]

with those dubious power connectors

You mean the ages old industry standard molex connectors used as standard PCIe power.