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

[sobkas]

So a tiny corporation saying their closed firmware is shit is enough for AMD to open source it? All those years the community begged for it and they were just ignored.

Money talks, AMD walks
It also could be a last straw to open more of the chips.

[TemplarGR]

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.

This is not as much of an issue as you think. Modern hardware, especially complex hardware like gpus, take a lot of time before it can reach production. Hardware that launches today, spent at least 5-6 years in the design and pre-production stages. You cannot just take any design and instantly produce it at the factory. Even if they acquire a brand new competitor's product right now, and spend some time reverse engineering it, it will take at least a couple of years (extremely optimistic estimate) until they can bring anything on the market using that knowledge. By that time, that hardware will be obsolete, even if they manage to avoid any lawsuits etc.

I am not saying reverse engineering doesn't happen, it happens all the time, but it is rarely in order to copy it (not to mention that most of the time they cannot copy it because it can't integrate well with their own stuff). Most of the time they do it to get an idea what the competition is doing, and perhaps to solve incompatibility issues and stuff like that.

[blackiwid]

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.

I also think that this is mostly bullshit, it's a claim probably mostly made by Nvidia or Nvidia Fans, did AMD ever state that this is true or that they fear that? I don't think so.
Even if you could let's say come up with a 1:1 clone (more or less) in 2 years, the only company that could have the state of the art access to production technology would be intel, and then if it's not very close / close to identical they would have to write the drivers again, theoretically they could take the opensource linux drivers and modify it slightly and use that fork, but how about windows? Use there also the opensource driver? A law suit if Intel would do it so close that they could use 99% the same driver would be highly likely succesful.

The biggest advantage AMD currently has is it's chiplet design and I doubt that any of that docu would help build that. The only realistic "competitor" that could help would be to bring up chinese or russian hardware companies create hardware that is not 10 years older technological to be 5 years behind.

[Panix]

AMD: We are open sourcing more of our code!

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

Blah, blah, blah...they're still incompetent - bugs and software that doesn't work right - it's probably to distance themselves and allow the 'open source community' pick up the slack. AMD still doesn't have a gpu monitoring program in Linux - and they've made up excuses for that, too.

[Panix]

DItched Nvidia/intel year ago and never looked back so far.

Only gamers say this (all they do is game).

[tenchrio]

Blah, blah, blah...they're still incompetent - bugs and software that doesn't work right - it's probably to distance themselves and allow the 'open source community' pick up the slack. AMD still doesn't have a gpu monitoring program in Linux - and they've made up excuses for that, too.

Have to be a bit clearer on that one, AMD has worked with NVTOP for a while now, even Intel and Apple work with it.
The only tool I can think that Nvidia themselves makes and ships is nvidia-smi and that is quite barebones compared to Nvtop or even the Nvidia specific Nvitop.

[darkbasic]

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

Typing from an AMD GPU either: the most open and best performing choice on Raptor CS Talos 2 ppc64le.

[Anux]

AMD still doesn't have a gpu monitoring program in Linux - and they've made up excuses for that, too.

I'm pretty sure I used one years ago, radeontop?

[Panix]

I'm pretty sure I used one years ago, radeontop?

Doesn't it just have basic functionality? It's not like Adrenalin in Windows, is it? Fan controls and over/underclocking/undervolting options?

[Anux]

Fan controls and over/underclocking/undervolting options?

You said something about monitoring. But there are other tools for overclocking, I just haven't used them.