[gentoo-amd64] Re: More ATi driver madness

["Duncan" <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

"Hemmann, Volker Armin" <volker.armin.hemmann@tu-clausthal.de> posted
200608130038.56469.volker.armin.hemmann@tu-clausthal.de, excerpted below,
on  Sun, 13 Aug 2006 00:38:56 +0200:

> On Sunday 13 August 2006 00:34, Antoine Martin wrote:
>>
>> I can't wait for ATI to open-source their crappy slaveryware drivers.
>>
> you can wait for a long, long time. heise.de reported today, that ATI
> will NOT opensource any drivers. They asked them and got a big fat NO as
> an answer.

Of course, it's all speculation at this point, but while they got no for
an answer, some of the discussion I've seen has pointed out that's exactly
what you'd expect folks from the ATI camp to say at this time -- before
the deal is closed and in fact before the shareholders have even voted on
it.  Not saying it will happen, not saying it won't, but simply that in
such a situation, spokespeople tend to keep saying the same thing until
they are told to say something different, because that's exactly what they
are getting paid to do.  At this point, it's not unreasonable that the
spokespeople simply don't know, in part because it's their job /not/ to
know some things at this point.

So I still have hope...

Meanwhile, if AMD's intent is to be able to sell the whole solution, cpu
and mobo chipset in some cases with integrated video, in ordered to better
compete with Intel, they'll pretty much /have/ to open-spec it at least to
a point, because Intel has.  To /not/ do so will leave them in a
competitive hole, with at least one segment of their market, and an often
early adopter one at that (Linux rolled out AMD64 support well before MS
did, and for some time, Linux was the primary market for it, something AMD
is well aware of, I'm sure).

Fortunately for me, I'm not planning on a hardware platform upgrade for at
least a couple more years (I'm dual Opteron 242 w/ 8 gig memory currently,
in a $400 Tyan dual-dual-core capable board I bought a couple years ago,
and will be upgrading to dual-core Opteron 270 or 272s later this year
after the upgrades drop the prices on socket 940s), and my Radeon 9200 AGP
driving dual 21" monitors with xorg's native drivers seems to work
relatively well, all things considered.

By the time I'm looking for a platform upgrade in 2-4 years (I figure back
to a single CPU again by then, but quad-core, maybe even octi-core),
AMD/ATI should have open sourced if they are going to. If they haven't, I
could well be buying Intel for the first time since my 486SX-25 w/ an
incredible 4 MB of RAM!  However, given all I've read about AMD's goals
and reasons for doing this merger, I still consider this the best chance
we've yet seen for AMD/ATI to release at least enough specs to allow
reasonable 3D, even if it they do reserve some of the best stuff as
closed, so I really do expect I'll still have a choice, and it won't be
Baked Intel or Fried Intel or Intel on bread or ... (xref Monty Python,
SPAM).

Of course, by then, we should have a bit better data on whether the OGP
(Open Graphics Project, google or wikipedia it if necessary) FPGA board
got enough buyers to allow them to launch the regular chip version, and
have at least some fix on how far off that might be if it did.  Depending
on how the timing all works out, it's just possible I'll be buying the
mobo/cpu platform with an OGP card in mind.  OTOH, if AMD opens their
video specs/drivers as Intel has, it's just possible it could roll NVidia
as well, and the OGP may end up not having a market, as everything else is
open speced at least to /some/ degree anyway.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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