It's probably about break-even in terms of direct costs; there are some extremely capable developers working on the open source drivers who are not on AMD's payroll, but the planning and execution of the IP review process eats up time from our most senior technical people, the ones who would otherwise be working on the GPUs and drivers we'll be selling 2-4 years from now.
The same goes for intangibles (risk, market benefits, "halo" effect, indirect benefit for other markets like embedded etc..) only the numbers are even harder to quantify.
What I think it boils down to is that if we were still a pure GPU company it would be hard to justify doing this, but as a GPU/CPU/platform company it does make sense. The hard part is that you still end up comparing apples and oranges when trying to determine the overall cost/benefit.
The same goes for intangibles (risk, market benefits, "halo" effect, indirect benefit for other markets like embedded etc..) only the numbers are even harder to quantify.
What I think it boils down to is that if we were still a pure GPU company it would be hard to justify doing this, but as a GPU/CPU/platform company it does make sense. The hard part is that you still end up comparing apples and oranges when trying to determine the overall cost/benefit.
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