Best regards to Bridgman. And welcome to the new public face slash general punching bag
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Bridgman Is No Longer "The AMD Open-Source Guy"
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Originally posted by RussianNeuroMancer View PostTim, congratulations! I hope you don't forget about XBMC-XvBA developers
Tim
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Originally posted by bridgman View PostNot blind, but a lot of the work was less visible than usual. There were three big contributors to that :
1. Moving to a new shader architecture (GCN), new memory management (GPUVM) and new shader compiler (llvm) at the same time. This was kind-of necessary but it meant that we had far more work in process where you couldn't see an obvious benefit. Using llvm was partly to build a good foundation for an open source OpenCL stack, and partly to get a more capable shader compiler into the graphics stack.
2. Doing speculative development on the two remaining weak spots of the current driver stack -- power management and accelerated video decode. Historically there was so much catch-up work to be done that we focused development efforts in areas where we were pretty sure we would be able to release the resulting code, so there was little risk of wasted effort and (relatively) short delays between writing code and having the results publicly visible.
In these last two areas we knew that the review/revise/repeat process would be a lot longer, but we reached the point where it made sense to dive in anyways. We had to write/debug a lot of code just to get the process going, so there was a bunch of work done there which hasn't shown you any real benefit yet.
3. Making a big push to have launch-time open source support. This is the ultimate "developers do a lot of work but you don't see anything" investment because you don't see the results until closer to hardware launch date, but it is an important step.
It's probably fair to say that more work has been done in the last year than any previous year, but relatively less of it has been immediately visible.
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To be precise, this is the first new GPU generation where development work was able to start early enough to give us a good chance of having support ready in time for product launch. I think what we said was "we're planning for it" (aiming for it / expecting it / working towards it, whatever) and that hasn't changed.
The obvious question is "why didn't you just start earlier before ?", and the answer is "because support for each new generation builds on support for the previous generation, so we need to finish initial support for the previous generation first".Last edited by bridgman; 20 September 2012, 03:26 PM.Test signature
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Thanks Bridgman!
Originally posted by phoronix View PostPhoronix: Bridgman Is No Longer "The AMD Open-Source Guy"
After five years of the open-source AMD strategy, John Bridgman is no longer managing these efforts...
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE4ODU
Best of luck with the new gig!
Best/Liam
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