AMD Says They'll Be Open-Sourcing More Of Their GPU Software Stack & Hardware Docs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Says They'll Be Open-Sourcing More Of Their GPU Software Stack & Hardware Docs

AMD Radeon posted to Twitter/X that "coming soon" they will be open-sourcing additional portions of their software stack as well as putting out more hardware documentation...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-More-OSS-Hardware-Docs

[gnif]

I wonder if my reddit post had something to do with this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/1bsjm5a/letter_to_amd_ongoing_amd/

[NeoMorpheus]

AMD: We are open sourcing more of our code!

FOSS Hypocrites : Not open enough! ....typed from their Ngreedia equipped computers...

[rene]

AMD: We are open sourcing more of our code!

FOSS Hypocrites : Not open enough! ....typed from their Ngreedia equipped computers...

Nope, Typing from my precious AMD GPU, because it is the highest performing running my Unmatched RISCV64 Linux Desktop ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv4-_a_3BKg

[ojsl1]

(AMD btw)

[varikonniemi]

Seems like AMD is running in the dark with no strategy, only reacting to absolute necessities as they arise.

Where TF is the AMD that promised to work with open source community? It does not mean you hire a developer to work on the driver that is published open source. It also means you publish all the same spec sheets as that developer has so that everyone can do same work.

this lawyers this lawyers that talk is getting old, only country int he world where legal department is half the company is USA. And maybe something should change. Like a company that stops that legal expense and only keeps the absolute minimum (like patented encryption) in a separate chip and opens the rest? While letting go of 75% of their lawyers.

But obviously every currently employed lawyer theyhave will fabricate a reason why this won't work as they don't want to become jobless.

[V1tol]

In any case I am glad I spent money on full AMD PC couple of years ago. Much better than having retarded Intel or cheating Nvidia as heaters in your house.

[Quackdoc]

Nice, glad to see the tinycorp stuff at least made some progress, Lets see if their compute situation will actually improve or if this is just fluff

[AmericanLocomotive]

Seems like AMD is running in the dark with no strategy, only reacting to absolute necessities as they arise.

Where TF is the AMD that promised to work with open source community? It does not mean you hire a developer to work on the driver that is published open source. It also means you publish all the same spec sheets as that developer has so that everyone can do same work.

Modern chips are extremely complicated, and any chip made in probably the last 15-20 years contains technology licensed from a variety of different companies. It's very common to straight up license whole entire blocks from companies, especially for the "lesser" things. For example, you might license a whole video decoder block from one company, system management processor from someone, your GDDR6 memory controller from another company, an AI accelerator from another, and then glue them all together. Each one of those blocks may have its own proprietary firmware.

So there is likely a lot of red tape to cut through to make sure you're not potentially open-sourcing proprietary IP you don't own.

Another potential issue is that open-sourcing your firmware can really expose how the hardware functions on a deep level. It's conceivable this could hurt competitiveness. But I would think any company sophisticated enough to actually spin their own GPU is probably clever enough to reverse engineer a firmware blob anyways.

[ezst036]

Seems like AMD is running in the dark with no strategy, only reacting to absolute necessities as they arise.

Where TF is the AMD that promised to work with open source community?

AMD is probably spending too much time working with Valve these days.