AMD Releases Open-Source Radeon HD 7000 Driver 84
An anonymous reader writes "AMD has publicly released the open-source code to the Radeon HD 7000 series 'Southern Islands' graphics cards for Linux users. This allows users of AMD's latest-generation of Radeon graphics cards to use the open-source Linux driver rather than Catalyst, plus there's also early support for AMD's next-generation Fusion APUs."
AMD needs to focus on OS (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD could help itself a great deal by focusing on open-source support. Intel does a pretty damn good job supporting open-source with drivers, but they lack top-end graphics hardware. nVidia provides a solid binary, but their *NIX support lags behind Windows.
If AMD becomes the number #1 graphics hardware on Linux, it could help even out their hot/cold CPU offerings.
Re:They still have a non-free dependency; go /w In (Score:5, Insightful)
ATI announced they were opening up, and I got ready to dump Nvidia. And then... it didn't happen.
Actually that's what did happen, they said they'd open up and for the most part they have - the instruction set for "decent 3D acceleration" is out there. A decent CPU analogy is that they promised x86_64 specs, you expected GCC. It doesn't magically make a team that's 2-3% the size of the proprietary team magically able to be 50 times as efficient, worse yet the hardware radically changes from generation to generation like now from VLIW to GCN which is basically to start over. And it continues to expand with geometry shaders, tesselation, new display standards, new chips etc. so it's a rapidly moving target.
For example, Mesa just got OpenGL 3.0 support last month, the standard was released back in 2008. That's not just lack of a driver, there's not even an implementation to accelerate. Of course you could say that AMD should release their proprietary driver/OpenGL implementation which would be nice indeed but isn't practical on so many levels and certainly not something they promised. Your post is essentially why nVidia doesn't want to get involved with OSS, it's "Whaaaaaaa give us specs, we'll write the code" "Okay here's specs" "Whaaaaaaaa performance sucks, write the code too".
Re:Bitcoins (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you also come out richer every time you buy something using Paypal?
Well, yes, that's the point of trade. I exchange something (in this case money) for something that I perceive to have higher value.