R800 3D mesa driver is shortly before release

[Qaridarium]

Opteron 6000, has 4 HT links, and 4 DDR3 memory controllers.
AM3, has 1 HT link, and 2 DDR3 controllers.

the memory controllers are plugged into the cpu by ht-links ;-)

[Lynxeye]

No they are not. The momory controllers are directly connected to the cpu's crossbar. The HT-Link is only used for peripherial and nearby cpu communication.

[KellyClowers]

"Happy" is when it WORKS, not when it's open source.

Really pathetic

[bridgman]

bridgman just points something about my writing in the past and maybe i was wrong in the past wenn i talk about htlink based dogging of the gpu to the cpu.

Actually no, I'm saying you're wrong today

CPUs are directly connected to the memory controller, but (a) can use HT links to access memory connected to another CPU, and (b) can respond to access requests over HT from attached IGPs and other peripherals. Normal CPU memory accesses do not go through HT.

[monraaf]

and o wow Q3 for evergR800n support means fusionR800Shader support.

in my point of view the eng-sample chips are already out there and now the driver shows to be ready to. means the Fusion Notebooks will be Selled in Q4 and the opensource driver for fusion will be ready in Q4

I remember the same thing being said about Evergreen. The ISA was mostly the same as R600/R700, just with a few new instructions added and some registers moved. Other than that the changes were mostly in the display controller part. And look now. There's still no acceleration for Evergreen! So don't get your hopes up.

Let's be a little realistic about this. AMD's open source driver team is heavily understaffed, and unless they are going to do something about that, I think it's more likely that we see Fusion support in the open source drivers in Q2 2011, more likely Q3 2011.

[bridgman]

I remember the same thing being said about Evergreen. The ISA was mostly the same as R600/R700, just with a few new instructions added and some registers moved. Other than that the changes were mostly in the display controller part.

Yeah, that's what we were told. We're digging a bit deeper this time

[elanthis]

Let's be a little realistic about this. AMD's open source driver team is heavily understaffed, and unless they are going to do something about that

They've been pretty explicit that their plan is for the community to get more involved, not for them to spend more money on staff.

[agd5f]

I remember the same thing being said about Evergreen. The ISA was mostly the same as R600/R700, just with a few new instructions added and some registers moved.

That's still mostly true, but the devil is in those little details. The driver came up much faster, but sorting out the little changes was the tough part. The documentation still has to go through IP review regardless.

[bridgman]

They've been pretty explicit that their plan is for the community to get more involved, not for them to spend more money on staff.

To be precise, what we're saying is that:

- with the *current* level of staffing and community involvement there has been much more progress than is immediately obvious, as a consequence of (a) catching up on several years of new hardware introduction and (b) community focus on moving to a new architecture for the driver stack rather than adding features & performance to the old architecture

- with the *current* level of staffing and community involvement we are approaching the point where we can be considered "caught up" and are working entirely on new HW support rather than backfilling for old HW and working on architectural changes

- with the *current* level of staffing and community involvement we expect that you will see more timely support for new hardware

[smitty3268]

- with the *current* level of staffing and community involvement we expect that you will see more timely support for new hardware

Once you have caught up to support hardware near the release date, is that what you expect AMD employees will be focusing on? Or will they also be able to help implement new features as well? (I'm thinking figuring out how to accelerate 4.0 tesselation on ATI hardware, for example).