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AMD Hiring Ten More People For Their Open-Source/Linux Driver Team

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  • #11
    Originally posted by Peter Fodrek View Post
    Let us look

    AMD Looks To Ramp Up Its Linux Engineer Count
    Written by Michael Larabel in AMD on 12 March 2011 at 11:00 AM EST.

    ..
    but Advanced Micro Devices has now announced they're looking to hire over one thousand "tech professionals" where the software engineers are skilled in Linux and open-source development.

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite



    As I know they hired Marek Olšák and two or three german people from 2011 to 2014 in this hiring period.
    The team has grown more than just Marek and a couple germans since then (I assume you're referring to Christian and Nicolai?), but I can imagine that those people are just the most visible externally due to activity on mesa. With that said, the article you quoted seems to be worded a bit weird to interpret correctly.

    None the less, lots of opertunities have been opening up quite recently due to new projects.

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    • #12
      Originally posted by sandy8925 View Post
      alexThunderAMD provides half hearted support on Linux, and sure Windows users are their main bread and butter.
      I would say some of the issues come down to the windows team having a lot more resources than the Linux, hence the need to hire.

      With the mainlining of the display code into the upstream kernel, the Linux support has increased significantly.

      EDIT: Note that I know that the display code push helped POLARIS/RX400's onwards (i.e. the VI/AI cards), but I'm not familiar with the effect on the SI/CIK cards that came before it.
      Last edited by Mystro256; 20 February 2019, 02:21 PM.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by Sanjuro View Post
        Another great news after AMD sponsored a developer to work on Blender/OpenCL
        I remember, there were several people lobbying hard for better OpenCL support in Blender on AMD's OpenCL forums. That thread drew a lot of attention and they finally got what they've asked for. Albeit it took some time to materialize.

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        • #14
          Originally posted by sandy8925 View Post
          The past isn't always indicative of the future, but it does factor into most decisions.
          Ask Michael to compare, say, the past 4 or 5 launches of major AMD products. You also have to consider they've spent huge amounts of time laying the ground work to smooth out adding new cards, new features, stability, and being able to root out issues. It still isn't perfect, look at the 590 launch (It seems like there's a disconnect that stems from the BIOS/Firmware team/branch handing things over a wall to the Linux team). The Fury launch was painful for several months. I would wager newer launches will be more in line with the Vega VII card.

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          • #15
            This is exactly why NVidia is no more in my "support list". The last few years, personally I only go for AMD or Intel for graphics cards, and that's what I also suggest to friends/family and businesses I support.

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            • #16
              Originally posted by sandy8925 View Post
              Yeah, and the best way to compete with Intel and NVIDIA, is to support all features on existing GPUs. Given their poor track record, when compared to Intel I'm not feeling so good about spending money on another high end AMD card. If they weren't willing to properly support $300 card like my R9 390, I'm not optimistic about spending money on AMD cards if there's competition with way better open source driver support.

              Of course, I'm definitely not going to buy NVIDIA due to their signed firmware, closed source driver and stupid EglStreams Wayland stunts. But if Intel releases a dedicated GPU,I'd rather take a chance with that even if it is unproven. The past isn't always indicative of the future, but it does factor into most decisions.
              That post is utter nonsense, because you miss one very important thing:

              Intel drivers are in a mixed bag state for current hardware, i experienced quite a lot of issues on those, and the support is even worse for older generations, in Windows and Linux.

              Windows 10 drivers for Sandybridge Graphics or older?
              Nope, not at all, not even Windows

              Featurerich drivers for older Intel HD graphics in Linux?
              Nope. There is quite some stuff missing and performance is mediocre.

              Most AMD Cards have aged much more gracefully.

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              • #17
                Mystro256 - DC is supported on SI/CIK cards too if you use the AMDGPU driver. Although it was a mess thanks to that blank screen after resume bug.

                However, note once again - AMDGPU support for SI/CIK is experimental. It's not turned on by default. Which means no Vulkan 1.1, no Freesync support etc. unless you turn on some flags. The default Radeon driver sucks - it was unstable and performed poorly on my R9 390, at least 4 years ago which was the main reason I switched to using AMDGPU.

                The R9 390 was released in 2015. Vulkan and Freesync support are experimental and will probably never be enabled by default. Zerocore power feature is apparently present, at least according to Wikipedia. And yet I've only heard of it being supported on the latest Vega GPUs on Linux. It makes me wonder why I should spend money on hardware with technology that will never be supported on Linux with open source drivers.

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by sandy8925 View Post
                  Yeah, and the best way to compete with Intel and NVIDIA, is to support all features on existing GPUs. Given their poor track record, when compared to Intel I'm not feeling so good about spending money on another high end AMD card. If they weren't willing to properly support $300 card like my R9 390, I'm not optimistic about spending money on AMD cards if there's competition with way better open source driver support.

                  Of course, I'm definitely not going to buy NVIDIA due to their signed firmware, closed source driver and stupid EglStreams Wayland stunts. But if Intel releases a dedicated GPU,I'd rather take a chance with that even if it is unproven. The past isn't always indicative of the future, but it does factor into most decisions.
                  Unfortunately I have to agree about AMD. I simply can't afford to buy another AMD GPU, no matter how cheap or "competitive" it is. I spent a pretty penny on one of their "latest and greatest" GPUs, a Sapphire Nitro R9 390, about 3 years ago and it's only been intermittently functional for about 6 months at most. Unfortunately I bought it about the same time AMD dropped Linux like a hot rock, and pretended it was a "wonderful" thing for "open source" development. And now that AMD has been completely negligent for three years they're beginning to call my card "too old" to support. How convenient for them.

                  In fact at this moment I'm desperately patching kernels trying to build a functional one that will support amdgpu and have working suspend/resume. I finally patched a 5.1 development kernel the other day and got suspend/resume to work, but later found it froze Thunar when copying files across the network. So I'm back at it again today.

                  As for Nvidia, I really don't see any other realistic choice, and at this point it's ridiculous to care about open/closed source. If I'm going to spend $300 or $400 or more on a GPU I need it to work. In fact for awhile AMD drivers didn't work at all on my home theater Athlon 5370 integrated GPU so I had to go buy a discrete GPU, and it was literally impossible to choose AMD. So I bought an Nvidia GT710 and it has had zero problems in over a year.

                  In fact it really doesn't matter if you get an old or new AMD GPU. There is simply no way to know if it will work today, tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. AMD has zero interest in its Linux customers, and is doing the absolute minimum possible for us. So I have no alternative other than to buy Nvidia from now on.

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                  • #19
                    Hibbelharry - Your statements don't make sense. Intel can't magically support features on GPUs where the hardware isn't present.

                    On Intel Sandybridge, they don't support VP9 decoding and encoding because the hardware isn't present. So it doesn't make sense to criticize them for that.

                    On all of their GPUs, if the hardware is present, the open source drivers support all of the hardware features. They even support APIs which aren't really used or required, for business purposes or for desktop users, like Vulkan 1.1 and OpenCL 2.0. Their iGPUs are clearly not as fast as AMD or NVIDIA dGPUs. Vulkan is mainly used for games, and OpenCL is mainly used for scientific computations, cryptocurrency mining etc. , and people who actually do those actions buy and use AMD and NVIDIA dGPUs. Sure there are some other cases like Blender and Libreoffice, but in the case of Blender as well the users are most likely using dGPUs. So why did Intel support it? I don't know. But they did add support.

                    While AMD doesn't properly support Open CL on the GPUs like 390 whose main strength is compute, and where the feature is most likely to be used, and which is one of the main reasons users buy such hardware. AMD has a lot more reason to care about supporting such features, and yet their support is pathetic compared to Intel's.

                    That's what I'm trying to highlight - a manufacturer that makes weak iGPUs supports all of it's features including some that most people won't use on it's iGPUs, while a major dGPU maker doesn't support those features on hardware whose main strength is that feature, and which people buy specifically to use those features.

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                    • #20
                      Spectacular, I hope every launch can be as smooth as the last one (and hopefully with more availability :- \), and they can ship mesa on Windows in a few years. ;- )

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