Intel's Intentions [LWN.net]

Intel's Intentions

Posted Feb 14, 2007 7:42 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Intel's Intentions by ldo
Parent article: Ubuntu says no to non-free video drivers for Feisty (Linux.com)

In a recent Debian Miniconf Keith Packard basicly said that Intel says they are commited to open source drivers. (I beleive he works for Intel now, as well as other X/Linux hackers)

And not only releasing drivers, but releasing them the same day they release the hardware to public. So on the day Intel hardware starts showing up in stores there will be a Linux driver that will work out-of-the-box.

Supposedly. This is the sort of thing were I'll beleive it when I see it. I am optimistic though with the modification they made to the firmware to enable breaking away from that nasty userland daemon.

BTW it's hard to call Intel a 'smaller player' when they outsell Nvidia and ATI combined. But, obviously, they are not competitive performance-wise and I suppose the temptation to get into bed with Microsoft heavily is very strong if it means getting a nice performance boost for the largest majority of your customers (Windows users).

DirectX/Direct3D is one of those things that is tied very close to your hardware.. it's not like OpenGL were you can support newer versions with a driver update. If your running a DirectX 8 card your not compatable, or at least much less compatable, then if your running a DirectX 9 card with DirectX 9 games.

With ATI and Nvidia they introduce new features and new 'extra' capabilities and extensions with each new card they produce. Then game makers and such will pick which features they like and then you end up with a ATI or Nvidia label on the box indicating what manufacturer the game makers prefer.

I suppose that if Microsoft, when drafting a new API (say DirectX 10 or 11), were to favor Nvidia's alredy existing extensions over ATI's cards then that would give quite a large advantage to Nvidia (and visa versa). So I would expect that if Microsoft said 'no open support for Linux' to either party then that means no open support.

A curious artifact of history is that around about the time Nvidia announced it's contract with Microsoft to produce the graphics for Xbox, and around about the time ATI announced it's contract for Xbox360, was around about the time they closed up tight against Linux. I don't know if that indicates anything or not.

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Intel's Intentions

Posted Feb 14, 2007 10:37 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

> A curious artifact of history is that around about the time Nvidia
> announced it's contract with Microsoft to produce the graphics for Xbox,
> and around about the time ATI announced it's contract for Xbox360, was
> around about the time they closed up tight against Linux. I don't know
> if that indicates anything or not.

Well, as MS was supposedly involved with technical stuff concerning the
design of the GPU's, they must have made the deal to keep
their 'intellectual property' closed, hence ATI and NVIDIA can't release
all their drivers for free anymore.

Intel's Intentions

Posted Feb 14, 2007 12:07 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Makes sense to me.

I wonder if AMD will make the effort to purge the Microsoft IP from their GPU designs then. I seem to remember reading something about it.

But since complex chips like that are designed two generations out then it's not something we are going to see happen very quickly, unfortunately.

I definately hope they get that 'IP' removed from their GPU designs before they start integrating them into their cpus!