It's Official - AMD Buys ATI

FrankNFurter writes "It's been a rumour for several weeks, but now it's confirmed: AMD buys ATI. What implications is this merger going to have for the hardware market?" In addition to AMD's release, there's plenty of coverage out there.

Re:Linux Support ?

[CowboyBob500]

Getting ANY of their stuff working under Linux is painful.

I'm running OpenSuSE 10.1 on my Thinkpad R51 with a pretty standard ATI Mobility Radeon and can I get the ATI drivers working? Can I hell. Always "no device for screen" or some such error. So I'm stuck with the OSS drivers which although are great for 2D, don't perform well enough for anything other than TuxCart.

On the other hand, the NVidia FX5900 in my desktop machine (also running OpenSuSE 10.1) was a breeze. Drop to run level 3, run installer, reboot, job done.

Bob

See Hackers Dictionary: "Wheel of reincarnation"

[kriegsman]

AMD needs GPU functionality on the CPU.

See the entry in the Hacker's Dictionary / Jargon File for "Wheel of reincarnation [catb.org]":

wheel of reincarnation: [1968] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again.

Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. [...]

-Mark

Re:Tomorrow

[ichigo 2.0]

http://contracts.corporate.findlaw.com/agreements/ amd/intel.license.2001.01.01.html [findlaw.com]

As far as I can tell this deal only covers patents made before 2001 (section 2). I could be wrong though, not very good at legalspeak, and didn't read the entire contract. AFAIK they have another cross-licensing agreement as well, but it only covers all x86 extensions and improvements. This is the deal that you're probably talking about as SSE and AMD64 are x86 extensions. So to answer your question: no they would not need to share tech acquired from ATI.

Re:Intel has killed gaming...but AMD has restored

[ichigo 2.0]

The problem is that Intel's integrated graphics is utterly incapable of running games, it doesn't even properly support DX9. On the other hand both Ati's and Nvidia's IGPs are DX9 compliant and lightyears faster than Intel's IGP. Thus we come to the conclusion that Intel is hurting gaming with it's crappy IGP, because you can't buy a similarly crippled IGP for AMD even if you wanted to. Luckily the next version of Intel's IGP will at least support the DX9 spec properly, as it wouldn't be able to display Vista's Aero UI otherwise..

Re:Maybe

[Tom]

Why are posters so fond of the anti-open source hardware vendor NVidia?

Because they've supported Linux with binary drivers for a long time, and their drivers work.

ATI is months behind, and half of the time the drivers are too buggy to actually use.

Philosophy of openness aside, that's an important difference.

Re:Don't believe it myself

[0123456]

"Hello? AMD chips have an integrated memory controller, with the AM2s having support for DDR2 memory, running at 667 MHz. So unbuffered memory, running in dual channel mode runs at a speed of approximately 10.7GB/sec. In comparison current graphics technology runs at about 6.4GB/sec."

Hello? My 7800GS card has a memory bandwidth of 40GB/second from on-board RAM. It would be utterly crippled by a measly 10GB/second shared with the CPU.

Graphics in software

[gr8_phk]

Processors are getting fast enough to do rendering in software again. GPUs are trying to become general purpose CPUs. People will soon have 2 cores as standard and 4 or more are on the way. What are people supposed to do with all those CPU cores? Replace the GPU with them of course. Why would a CPU maker need to buy a GPU maker? Not sure, but perhaps just to gain the graphics expertise to write the software, and possibly to make some suggestions for the instruction set and hardware. I certainly hope they don't just integrate the GPU onto the same die - that's so unnecessary.

IMHO a much better - and cheaper - buy would have been that company (don't remember name) that has a really fast DirectX implementation in software. You don't even need a frame buffer any more, just put some circuitry in the north bridge that pulls data from main memory and spits it out over DVI-D. Let software on multiple cores take care of rendering.

For reference, I think we're still on track for software realtime raytracing by 2012. If we can do that, certainly software can rasterize polygons fast enough before then. The GPU as we know it is dead - good for ATI finding an exit strategy, bad for AMD spending so much money. What's nVidia's exit strategy? Intel already knows a lot about graphics.

Re:Tomorrow

[mallan]

And to counter your argument: what happens in two years when ATI and NVidia decide your card is too old to support, and yet it still performs very well but you NEED the features in the latest kernel and latest x.org?

Um, NVIDIA still supports the TNT on Linux, and that card was released in 1998.

Just because proprietary software vendors can be evil/irresponsible/negligent/whatever doesn't necessarily mean they will be. I think that, by now, NVIDIA has proven that they're a responsible player in the Linux arena.

One correction.

[LWATCDR]

"AMD doesn't like closed technology like Intel does. So it'll be an open platform still which is a 'good thing' (tm). "
Actually Intel has been a big supporter of OSS. They helped port Linux the Itanium and have provided all the documentation to their video chips.
I think you are confusing Intel with Microsoft. Intel has been one of the most open hardware companies.
AMD has also been very good. ATI like nVidia.... Well let's say not so good.
I really don't get this.
AMD could use some good chip-sets but they have made their own for the Opteron so I don't see what they gain from ATI.
AMD could use a good low end integrated video solution for low end desktops and servers. Yes it is true but servers almost never use nVidia or ATI graphics cards. When I set up a server I only plug the monitor in when I do the install and if something really bad happens.
I have to think this comes down to laptops. AMD has not done well in that market and a one stop shop for a laptop solution like Intel offers might be a good solution.
I wouldn't hold my breath on the good open source ATI drivers for Linux. Of course if it happens I might dump my nVidia based motherboard and Video card. I have been buying nVidia just because of their better Linux support for years.

Re:Tomorrow

[mallan]

Use the "Legacy GPU" drivers. GeForce 256 is still supported.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html [nvidia.com]

Re:Tomorrow

[Cutie Pi]

You've obviously never tried to reverse engineer a chip using an electron microscope. If so, you wouldn't be saying it is "relatively simple". You obviously don't realize that modern chips have upwards of 8 layers of wiring stacked on top each other, that cover the local interconnects and transister wiring (poly and active area). Now, let's say you can decompose the chip, layer by layer, snapping photos as you go. With today's 65 and 95nm processes, you can only see a few transistors at a time, given the resolution and field of view of the microscope. These chips have millions of transistors on them. How long do you think it would take to cover a sizeable area of the chip, to the point that you could gain some useful information about it? At best, you could probably look at a few latch circuits at a time... That's like looking at the grains of sand on a beach and trying to map out the coastline of Hawaii. By the time these alleged reverse engineers are done, Nvidia would have released two new architectures. Money and time are much better spent creating rather than copying.

x86-64 is not part of the IP sharing

[default luser]

This is because x86-64 is an open standard. AMD released it as open when they announced it, because it was the only way to gain industry acceptance.

Once AMD got Microsoft's cooperation building support for x86-64 into Windows, they hardped on about the open standard. This protected AMD from Intel, who were already secretly working on their own implementation of x86-64. Normally, once Intel realized how potentially powerful x86-64 was, they were sure to create their own incompatible version (ala SSE and 3DNOW!) to try and derail AMD.

But the open standard stopped Intel from doing this. Microsoft pointed to the open standard, and told Intel flat-out that they were not going to support two versions of 64-bit x86.

x86-64 is an open standard. AMD's copyrighted implementation of x86-64 is called AMD64. Inte;'s copyrighted implementation of x86-64 is EMT64.

Re:Makes me uneasy

[moosesocks]

No. The grandparent poster has a point.

nVIDIA came out of nowhere about 5-6 years ago, whilst ATI has been firmly entrenched in the marketplace for a much longer time.

nVIDIA was able to grow so quickly, because their products were faster, less buggy, and better supported than anything on the market at the time. ATI was just barely able to keep up, and everyone else bit the dust.

The consumer-end graphics industry has been known for buggy drivers for almost its entire existance. nVIDIA's biggest innovation was not necessarily in hardware, but in software instead. By shipping a unified driver for all of its products, it was easy for them to fix bugs in the drivers years after the products they supported came out, and continually tweak those drivers. As a result, they wound up with a rock-stable platform that ATI took years to match.

I'm not saying ATI's terrible (I'd consider them to be about average), but in terms of stability and product support, there's little doubt that nVIDIA leads the industry.

AMD on the other hand, I see as a great company with great leadership. I hope that they can turn ATI around, and push out some innovative products. AMD's committed to open standards, and is known for its ethical business practices, not to mention that they tend to do much of their manufacturing and product development within the US.

Who knows how this will all balance out?

Re:x86-64 is not part of the IP sharing

[nuzak]

You can't mix 32-bit and 64-bit modes within a single context, and drivers run in-process (with the kernel). For the same reason, you can't link 32-bit libraries in 64-bit programs, thus the reason you have no Flash plugin on a 64-bit Firefox.

Windows used to use some really moby hacks with thunks to get 16-bit libraries working with 32-bit code, but they don't use it for NT, and opted for virtualization (WOW/NTVDM) instead. It's not perfect virtualization, but it's enough to count. Presumably they do the same thing for 32 bit code in Win64.

It's another great argument for userspace drivers, since they could be as 32-bit as they wanted to be.