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

[phoronix]

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

If you are passionate about Linux/open-source and experienced with the 3D graphics programming and/or compute shaders, AMD is looking to expand their open-source/Linux driver team by about ten people...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Hiring-10-More-Open-Source

[Guest]

Good! Hopefully they will work on improving support for older GPUs, including OpenCL and video decoding/encoding.

[cb88]

Good! Hopefully they will work on improving support for older GPUs, including OpenCL and video decoding/encoding.

I think you should accept what older GPUs are for what they are (and they are the best Open Source GPU drivers), they'll continue to be supported but AMD probably has a lot of work to do in supporting their upcoming architectures on Linux/Windows. Without focusing on the past. I think the are gearing up to actually compete with Nvidia.

[Peter Fodrek]

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.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTIwNA

As I know they hired Marek Olšák and two or three german people from 2011 to 2014 in this hiring period.

[Guest]

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.

[alexThunder]

The past isn't always indicative of the future, but it does factor into most decisions.

True. That's why I'm now waiting for reviews and reports (mainly Reddit & Phoronix) before I buy a new card. Has been working wonderfully for me.

[Guest]

alexThunder - Well, reviews and reports don't matter. We've already seen how the support is, for several AMD cards. When I was debating which card to buy in 2015, I decided on the 390 instead of the Fury because the Fury's support was still new and I wasn't sure how stable it would be. But in the years since, I've had so many problems with the 390, many of which were not fixed for months. It was either unusable or severely crippled. AMDGPU driver is still experimental for the R9 390, while on Windows Vulkan 1.1, Open CL 2.0 and H.264, H.265 decoding and encoding are officially supported and it's not considered an experimental driver for the 390.

Reviews and reports only help to find out initial support status. What about all of the other features, when do they get supported? They don't. Ever.

AMD provides half hearted support on Linux, and sure Windows users are their main bread and butter.

But if we look at Intel, they support Vulkan 1.1 and OpenCL 2.0, despite the fact that their hardware is clearly not as fast as AMD or NVIDIA cards like. Neither API is important for desktop users, companies running servers, or workstation users. And yet they support it.

[Sanjuro]

Another great news after AMD sponsored a developer to work on Blender/OpenCL

[R41N3R]

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.

As a owner of a RX480 I made the opposite experience, since the launch of the card the drivers improved drastically and we've seen so many technological changes. Radeon VII offered exceptional good drivers (RadeonSI+RADV) at launch day already so that I couldn't resist to get one :-) But I totally understand you, if I would have made the same experience I would be very reluctant too.

[ElectricPrism]

As a owner of a RX480 I made the opposite experience, since the launch of the card the drivers improved drastically and we've seen so many technological changes. Radeon VII offered exceptional good drivers (RadeonSI+RADV) at launch day already so that I couldn't resist to get one :-) But I totally understand you, if I would have made the same experience I would be very reluctant too.

I bought into RX 480 6 months after launch and the next 2 years I can confirm what you describe is exactly what happened. The drivers improved immeasurably in that time, many games that wouldn't run at all did start to run and now I can't think of anything that I am trying to play that I can't. For daily Linux PC usage it's nice to switch in and out of TTY more seamlessly and I'm sure there are other cool parts too I have forgotten if not just not having the weird bugs I used to have before going AMD.