PathScale Is Hiring To Work On Open-Source AMD Drivers

[asdfblah]

On a side note - I really look forward to openCL support for the radeon drivers, because then I can actually put my 2nd GPU to use when running linux.

There is OpenCL support in radeon already: http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/GalliumCompute/ , but I guess you would have to either find a distro that uses LLVM 3.5 to compile Mesa, or do that by yourself, and ask tstellar if you have any problems.

[DrYak]

Serious question - i think some of their past stuff has been kept proprietary

On the other hand they are not in the business of selling closed source drivers.

Their main business is compiler with GPGPU support. Helping with AMD OpenCL is just a side note that happens to help them with their own agenda:
by helping better open-source support for OpenCL on AMD hardware, they make it easy to deploy AMD hardware on clusters, thus enabling a bigger market of cluster, thus more customer for their actual selling product.

(It's exactly the same situation as Google both paying Mozilla and developing their own Chrome browser all for free: that helps more people onto internet where these people will use google's service and enable google to make more ad-money).

[smitty3268]

Do they intend to make this work open source?

Serious question - i think some of their past stuff has been kept proprietary, and all the OSS graphics code is MIT licensed which would allow them that option.

[schmidtbag]

Intel is probably closer currently, not to mention Radeon isn't perfect at all for various reasons.

Proportionate to the Windows drivers, intel performs better and gets support for things much quicker. However, I've had much better performance and much less 3D rendering issues on radeon.


On a side note - I really look forward to openCL support for the radeon drivers, because then I can actually put my 2nd GPU to use when running linux.

[Calinou]

That would be pretty funny, and amazing, and awesome. While it shouldn't be another company's obligation to be working on drivers for another company's hardware, every additional source of contribution helps. Within a couple years I can see the open source radeon drivers being the best drivers for all of linux.

Intel is probably closer currently, not to mention Radeon isn't perfect at all for various reasons.

[Ancurio]

Maybe Mesa will indeed reach OGL 4.0 compliance this year. No sarcasm!

This work is not about OpenGL.

[BSDude]

Maybe Mesa will indeed reach OGL 4.0 compliance this year. No sarcasm!

[schmidtbag]

Outstanding..I think it would be hilarious that it might wind up being possible to run FAH on the open source drivers before you can on Catalyst.

That would be pretty funny, and amazing, and awesome. While it shouldn't be another company's obligation to be working on drivers for another company's hardware, every additional source of contribution helps. Within a couple years I can see the open source radeon drivers being the best drivers for all of linux.

[DarkFoss]

Outstanding..I think it would be hilarious that it might wind up being possible to run FAH on the open source drivers before you can on Catalyst.

[89c51]

That's what I call a good news

What he said. Good news indeed.