AMD Joins Up With Intel & Nokia On MeeGo Linux

[devius]

Shipping Core2 Duos with nVidia graphics isn't going to cut it much longer, and they clearly have space constraints which prevent use of a discreet gfx solution looking at the 15"and 17" laptops. Would anyone want to bet against an AMD CPU + GPU solution next year?

I wouldn't be to surprised if some member of the AMD Brazos family made its way into the next MacBook Air refresh. It makes perfect sense given that relying on core i3 ULV with integrated graphics alone would mean a decrease in gpu power.

Brazos is also probably the reason that AMD wants in on Meego.

[RobbieAB]

Nvidia going bankrupt? Not to drive the thread off-topic but I thought Nvidia is doing best, they usually have better and sooner OpenGL support, Apple has chosen Nvidia for its hw, why would it go bankrupt..

Look to the Mac Pros... They are shipping Radeon.

It will be interesting to see what Apple put in NEXT years MacBooks, because they have a MAJOR problem with the graphics there given the current models. Shipping Core2 Duos with nVidia graphics isn't going to cut it much longer, and they clearly have space constraints which prevent use of a discreet gfx solution looking at the 15"and 17" laptops. Would anyone want to bet against an AMD CPU + GPU solution next year?

...they're [nVidia] not doing as hot as they could-

I thought part of their problem was they WERE doing as hot as they could...

[meklu]

This doesn't make any sense. I'll get back to this in a moment.

...

This is where we get into the point where meklu's post makes no sense what-so-ever. Right now the source code for AMD's driver releases are the same. Improvements to the Windows OpenGL driver benefit the Linux driver as well.

...

Now, if meklu had said something to the effect of: perhaps now AMD will invest more resources in OpenGL... that would have made sense.

...

Perhaps I phrased my post a bit badly but investing resources in OpenGL was pretty much the point.
Anyways, I tend to be a bit pessimistic at times which should explain the fglrx part of my post. Well that's what you sometimes get for trying to write in a foreign language

[V!NCENT]

nVidia's proprietary drivers on Windows used to beat ATI's because they improved performance with older games, whilst the ATI drivers used to only fix performance issues in the popular games that were at that time current.

Nowadays nVidia only increases performance with faster cards and AMD is now know to increase performance with each new driver they release. Wether that is true I do not know, but I do think that they do given their recode from scratch, but it definately sells. AMD cards are also cheaper and greener. Only a fool buys an nVidia for Windows and a select few buy it for their Linux driver, although fglrx is almost on to par with it on Linux.

nVidia cards don't really make any sense for a customer and given that they lost the reason to buy, nVidia might go 3dfx, AMD stops advancing cards really fast and thus greener cards and longer lifetime of a card can be guaranteed.

[TechMage89]

I have reason to believe from what I've seen and heard that Nvidia isn't as well-run as they used to be. Unless they can turn themselves around and build some kind of coherent strategy (more than "let's pack some more multiprocessors on a die and people will buy it"), they'll be in trouble soon.

It seems like they're losing to AMD and Intel in the mid-range and low-end markets, where a lot of the money is. Fusion has the potential to push them out of the mobile market almost completely.

BTW, Fusion looks amazing, and I really hope it has really good Linux support (i.e. I hope a G3D driver is in development a while before Fusion chips are on the shelves, and I hope the instruction set for the GPU is available once they release). This could be amazing from the perspective of using the GPU for a lot of things that were previously dominated by bus-latency.

[Svartalf]

Nvidia going bankrupt? Not to drive the thread off-topic but I thought Nvidia is doing best, they usually have better and sooner OpenGL support, Apple has chosen Nvidia for its hw, why would it go bankrupt..

Heh... Just because they have good drivers and they have chosen NVidia for their hardware doesn't mean much really in the scheme of things.

About 5 years ago, it was the other way around with Apple- just for starters...mainly because AMD was providing better product and better service to Apple at the time.

I'd say with the disastrous BGA solder ball problem that NVidia had a bit back that cost them at least $200 million or more in 2008... they're not doing as hot as they could- couple that with the seriously delayed Fermi rollout... They can't be sitting as pretty as you're implying.

[cl333r]

Nvidia going bankrupt? Not to drive the thread off-topic but I thought Nvidia is doing best, they usually have better and sooner OpenGL support, Apple has chosen Nvidia for its hw, why would it go bankrupt..

[Saist]

Perhaps now AMD will have some more resources for fglrx.

This doesn't make any sense. I'll get back to this in a moment.

fglrx?
if they support meego they will probably invest into their open drivers.

agreed. Products on that low-end are not expected to have good fast-pass rendering performance and tend to need more well-rounded feature sets, not shader throughput. E.G., I don't really care that my Radeon 9600 power Crysis. I do expect it to be able to handle a Youtube video through.

Now, that having been said, AMD is pushing the netbook gaming angle pretty hard with games like City of Heroes. We know that some of the CoH devs and temp hires have had *nix training, been sent out for *nix training, or had some *nix background. We also know that Valve is going to do a Steam Linux Client, and we know that Valve is in negotiation with developers who have Linux clients that already sell through to OSX and Windows through the existing steam version.

Currently most games that are "commercially" complex do not really work with the open drivers. Given the background information that we have though, it is possible that AMD, Valve, and other publishers / developers see the potential retail values with performance games atop Linux platforms.

This is where we get into the point where meklu's post makes no sense what-so-ever. Right now the source code for AMD's driver releases are the same. Improvements to the Windows OpenGL driver benefit the Linux driver as well.

Now, if meklu had said something to the effect of: perhaps now AMD will invest more resources in OpenGL... that would have made sense. To be fair, AMD is "finally" working their OpenGL driver support as evidenced by the multiple 10.10 hotfix drivers on Windows. Now, AMD might finally be paying attention to OpenGL again because more game publishers and game developers are realizing that DirectX is a catastrophically expensive mistake. Or they might finally be paying attention to OpenGL again because Nvidia's off doing... who knows what. Going Bankrupt if the investors are to be believed.


Anyways, if the game publishers and game developers do see the retail value in supporting Linux as a platform, that might be enough to push AMD to invest more developers on making specific *nix centric optimizations for the Linux release rather than the generic OpenGL shared-source approach currently in use.

[d2kx]

MeeGo will ship the open source drivers. If this news means anything, then excellent open source support for AMD Fusion (did I say I am totally getting an AMD Fusion powered notebook?).

[Pfanne]

Perhaps now AMD will have some more resources for fglrx.

fglrx?
if they support meego they will probably invest into their open drivers.