Why More Companies Don't Contribute To X.Org

[marek]

About Wayland, is it REALLY an Ubuntu project?!

Nothing is an Ubuntu project. Canonical sends nearly no code to upstream. Ubuntu just uses what others have produced. Mark Shuttleworth has even indirectly said that they do nothing (= he said they only try to get Linux to masses).

[drag]

Yes, I know the market share of intel IGP's is bigger than ATI + nVidia in conjuction... Although there will always be a market for discrete GPU's while we still need them for some heavy graphic demands or GPGPU, (for instance)... Integrated GPUs is the way to go in mobile market, but in the desktop one, I don't think so... (personal opinion, OC)

The Intel Sandy Bridge i5 processor is already defeating low-end discrete GPUs in benchmarks on Windows.

The principal limitation for IGP performance is lack of memory bandwidth. Your fighting with the CPU over the memory controller. With the memory controller and GPU as part of the processor, though, that is a different beast entirely.

Video cards will just get pushed higher and higher. People that will want the best graphics performance will want video cards for a long long time, but eventually that will go away too.

For many workloads your going to start to see the negative effects of latency that happens when you moving information over the PCI Express bus versus sharing the same memory segments. Increasing memory bandwidth to the central processor is certainly possible... getting rid of latency from hanging a GPU off of the far end up a PCI Express bus (or any other interconnect) is not. The more information your moving from CPU to the GPU the worse it's going to be for a discrete video card.

[drag]

Nothing is an Ubuntu project.

oh? Who is making Unity?

[TemplarGR]

oh? Who is making Unity?

Unity is Ubuntu-specific. Yeah, it could be used by other distros too, but i don't believe many will...

If we are to count distro-specific software, we should include the various package managers and guis other distros use too...

If we are talking about upstream projects, Canonical's contributions are minimal at best...

[evolution]

I know...

Nothing is an Ubuntu project. Canonical sends nearly no code to upstream. Ubuntu just uses what others have produced. Mark Shuttleworth has even indirectly said that they do nothing (= he said they only try to get Linux to masses).

I know, I just was using a bit of irony in the subject...

Cheers

[deanjo]

There's a difference between bullying and 'just fscking with ya '. If you can't withstand something as playfull and small like that then I fear for you entering society. My friends a doing stuff like that all the time with eachother. It builds a better bond, too, "lol remember when we did that?". C'mon....

Do you really think, given the history of bad blood between Xorg and that developer was to "build a better bond?". Come on, that was hardly the case.

[RobbieAB]

Yes, I know the market share of intel IGP's is bigger than ATI + nVidia in conjuction... Although there will always be a market for discrete GPU's while we still need them for some heavy graphic demands or GPGPU, (for instance)... Integrated GPUs is the way to go in mobile market, but in the desktop one, I don't think so... (personal opinion, OC)

Just like there will always be a market for discrete FPUs? [/sarcasm]

Modern GPUs are exceedingly parallel SIMD FPU cores at a very basic level. I expect there will always be a market for discrete framebuffer cards, but the actual rendering will move to the CPU once the CPU has the performance to be "good enough". At that point, economies of scale will mean that simply throwing more CPUs at the problem will get you performance cheaper than using a highly specialised card even for the very high end usage.

At least that is how I would expect it to go.

[deanjo]

Just like there will always be a market for discrete FPUs? [/sarcasm]

Modern GPUs are exceedingly parallel SIMD FPU cores at a very basic level. I expect there will always be a market for discrete framebuffer cards, but the actual rendering will move to the CPU once the CPU has the performance to be "good enough". At that point, economies of scale will mean that simply throwing more CPUs at the problem will get you performance cheaper than using a highly specialised card even for the very high end usage.

At least that is how I would expect it to go.

Throwing more general purpose cpu's against a specialized solution is always going to be a less efficient solution. It's not like those specialized solutions are going to sit on their asses and not progress while general purpose solutions advance. Don't forget that for those high performance groups "good enough" maybe ok for your general user but "good enough" rarely is a phrase heard from demanding users as performance is usually the determining factor.

[drag]

Unity is Ubuntu-specific. Yeah, it could be used by other distros too, but i don't believe many will...

If we are to count distro-specific software, we should include the various package managers and guis other distros use too...

I do. Those are still all projects.

If we are talking about upstream projects, Canonical's contributions are minimal at best...

Sorta.

In terms of code, yes.
In terms of getting people to actually use the software... they are instrumental.

[drag]

Throwing more general purpose cpu's against a specialized solution is always going to be a less efficient solution. It's not like those specialized solutions are going to sit on their asses and not progress while general purpose solutions advance. Don't forget that for those high performance groups "good enough" maybe ok for your general user but "good enough" rarely is a phrase heard from demanding users as performance is usually the determining factor.

I believe he is talking about moving the specialized cores to be part of the processor as extra cores on the same die as regular general purpose processor.

As far as computers go there is a lot of things to consider. Performance is just one factor out of many.