To end your speculation: AMD closing down the OSRC in Dresden and it's not just those 3 guys. I would call it very unlikely that those guys prefer to relocate to another continent, just to keep their job within a struggling company.
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There is tons of work from AMD going into LLVM/Clang that includes Linux.
Losing 3 dudes with Linux kernel experience is a pot in a giant pee bowl. Relax.
AMD driver sucks anyways. Anyone who want decent Linux support should get an nvidia card.
It just so happens that besides FreeBSD that Linux is working on making LLVM/Clang first class to build their kernel and since you mention kernel more and more of what the kernel does via messaging will be to pass parallel processing loads on to kernels built in OpenCL.
Uh, what? Are you high?
That has absolutely nothing to do with the kernel's cpu support. Without the kernel's cpu support:
a) it may not boot
b) you may not get any power-saving
c) you may not get full performance
d) you may not get sensor data
...