Bettering Radeon Gallium3D Performance With PCI-E 2.0

[bridgman]

2) Catalyst is made of share code for the 90% of it and the linux team is very little (20? 30? maybe even 50 peoples?) because of that, those developers alone wouldn't be able to develop a competitive stack because the shared part is made by thousands of developers.

Exactly. That's the primary reason proprietary drivers exist at all for open OSes -- they let you share code with proprietary OSes and as a consequence deliver a lot more functionality and performance than the same number of developers could provide in a separate code base.

[Qaridarium]

Peoples will care about free software only if someone will find a way to stop piracy, when they will have to pay 600$ for a microsoft office suite plus another 600$ for a retail copy of windows just because someone sent them a fucked .doc (or whatever they call it in office 20${XY}) something will change.

windows8 fix this for you TCPA to stop piracy.

[whizse]

So what are the plans for using pcie_gen2=1 by default? Couldn't the incompatible motherboards be blacklisted instead of turning it off for everyone?

[89c51]

Exactly. That's the primary reason proprietary drivers exist at all for open OSes -- they let you share code with proprietary OSes and as a consequence deliver a lot more functionality and performance than the same number of developers could provide in a separate code base.

galium3d is supposed to do the same -share code among OSes- but i haven't seen anyone jumping on it and releasing an FOSS driver for all OSes

too big of a change i assume but anyway

[Eduard Munteanu]

Peoples will care about free software only if someone will find a way to stop piracy, when they will have to pay 600$ for a microsoft office suite plus another 600$ for a retail copy of windows just because someone sent them a fucked .doc (or whatever they call it in office 20${XY}) something will change.

But companies generally care about that sort of legal stuff. I do wonder why exactly FOSS adoption isn't all that commonplace in companies, even partial adoption (e.g. some free office suite on Windows), especially when your employees don't have specific requirements. It could be MS gives you a better TCO/risk, it could be free stuff indeed has some rough edges or it could be management isn't comfortable with saying "no, ask for documents in a non-proprietary format from your contacts/customers". In any case, I guess it's easy to conclude proprietary software is the way to go and not give it a second thought, since it obviously worked out for many others.

[AnonymousCoward]

galium3d is supposed to do the same -share code among OSes- but i haven't seen anyone jumping on it and releasing an FOSS driver for all OSes

What systems would that be? For Windows and Macos it'll presumably take a lot of work to get them working at all, and then the proprietary drivers will still be better, and all those small niche systems like Haiku and so on will probably be hard-pressed to come up with the required manpower.

[liam]

But I imagine looking at e.g. the power saving code could still tell a very good programmer why radeon on the "low" profile still uses more power than fglrx.

I mean, why doesn't AMD simply have somebody going over the code of catalyst, deleting everything patented or "secret" and release the nonfunctional rest? Could still be helpful for low level stuff like power saving and communicating properly with the hardware...

Do you have any idea who long that would take? I think Bridgeman has said catalyst includes something like 10s of millions of lines of code (IIRC). Going through that, line by line, and having legal agree with you, would take many years.

[smitty3268]

sure you are a nice dev but economic isn't your strength.

In economic you deal with the future not with the past or with the presence.

this means the grow factor is more important than the market-share.

right now linux do have 3,5%(2%andorid) market share (source: wikipedia.org) and a grow rate of 40% every 6 month (source: Net Applications ).
and market analyst found out that nearly 80% of all companys wana grow there opensource usage to lower costs. (source: linux foundation market survey)

just do the mathematics: calculate grow rate 40% every 6 month on the market share 1,5%

this numbers prove : Microsoft is allready death

AMD doesn't have any hardware in phones/tablets, so you can basically take Android out of those numbers, and end up with very little left over.

[Qaridarium]

AMD doesn't have any hardware in phones/tablets, so you can basically take Android out of those numbers, and end up with very little left over.

the point is: amd want the andorid part to.

[smitty3268]

the point is: amd want the andorid part to.

Sure, but they're probably still at least a couple years out from getting that hardware. It's completely fair to say the market for software drivers isn't there yet since they don't have anything.

I think their last CEO was fired basically for the decision to sell of their mobile graphics division to Quallcom. It will take them some time to recover from that decision.