AMD Open Source Driver Supports Latest GPUS
Hopefully the kernel driver rewrite pays off, and not just in time saved supporting separate Catalyst and free kernel modules. AMD on Linux is infamously slow, and while their Windows driver situation has never been particularly good, they get crushed by Nvidia.<p>Thats also bad, because they are also the most freedom hostile major hardware manufacturer on the market. Some other contenders like Broadcom, Intel, and Qualcomm all participate some engineer time somewhere in the open stack, albeit not across all their products, but literally nothing Nvidia makes is open at all, and they even go the extra mile nowadays to use signed drivers to stop Nouveau development.<p>Anyone who cares about eventually seeing a world where GPU programming is as open as CPU is (was) also cares to see AMD succeed on Linux, being the only major discrete GPU developer out there besides Nvidia, and whose legacy IP has gone into the largest mobile GPUs on Android as well (Adreno). They might have proprietary power management firmware on their cards, but at least they publish the ISA. Can you imagine a CPU without an open instruction set?