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Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express ChipsetFree software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express ChipsetPosted May 11, 2007 12:15 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)In reply to: Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset by nix Parent article: Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset
I've owned a variety of hardware with R100 and R200 family chipsets. On some of the hardware 3D it crashes pretty easily (e.g. one machine wouldn't last more than a few minutes running Quake 3), on other hardware it's quite stable, but it's still definitely the least reliable part of the system.
So far as I can tell the big two vendors (I haven't tried Intel) design hardware for performance first and foremost, then cost, and reliability is definitely an afterthought. It would be possible to design these chipsets so that you had to do something fairly stupid to lock them up, but instead they're incredibly sensitive to everything from timing to data layout.
The vendors own drivers aren't able to make this stuff actually stable, as gamers on Windows soon learn. You can expect that any new game will cause a few crashes or lockups until the drivers get tweaked to make them less likely or you lose interest in playing. This isn't with "known bad" hardware either, a mid-range IBM Thinkpad laptop running World of Warcraft might crash to the Windows "Your video system died and I can't fix it" screen once a week or so, leaving the player to reboot their PC. Players just learn that this is "normal" and put up with it.
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Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset Posted May 11, 2007 12:48 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Hopefully improvements in technology will render most of the traditional 'discrete hardware acceleration' mostly obsolete.
If you think about it people have been saying that 'software rendering' is the future for a long time now. And although very slow software rendering is very stable and gives a very good visual image. (if you don't mind slideshows, of course)
Intel seems to want to go with a approach that leads to a massive number of very simple x86-like cores that able to perform massive amounts of parrallel graphic-related calculations very quickly.
Make x86-like to make it easy for normal folks to program. Have them all pipelined together so you can essentially program your own GPU to match what you need. Then since it's generic you can program it for lots of different sorts of stuff like media encoding or maybe OpenRT (realtime raytracing).
Then since they are x86-like it makes sense to me that with some code optimizations you could recompile Mesa to use these devices and get essentially hardware-acceleration speeds with these cores. Pretty much remove most of the distinction between GPU and CPUs.
They are aiming to release a discrete video card in 2009 that is designed to compete head to head with Nvidia. Supposedly up to 16 cores for the high-end model. Several times more powerfull then the current high-end cards.
Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset Posted May 11, 2007 20:33 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Sounds more like a Cell's SPUs than anything else to me, only a SPU withhigh-speed access to the video controller.
Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset Posted May 11, 2007 22:56 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Well you know, in terms of cpu technology IBM has always lead the pack.
I just hope that Intel does open up everything enough that just your normal average C hacker will be able to make stuff to configure and run on these cores themselves.
It would be a very cool to be able to leverage your video card's proccessing power to do special things like rendering raytracing, or do media encoding and such things. I think that we'd be a lot further along in terms of 3d graphics and virtual environments, also, if it wasn't for these things being so damn proprietary all the time.
Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset Posted May 12, 2007 9:36 UTC (Sat) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] Modern graphics cards AFAICT basically *are* general purpose processors running a custom-built software renderer -- the hardware is a bit different from your average CPU (massively parallel array of little chips with weird instruction sets and cache structure), but whatever. It's a supercomputer, except it retails at ~$1k and it goes in a PCI slot. (I know at least one person who is literally using a high-end NVidia to replace an honest-to-goodness cluster).
It'd be nice if it were possible to get at those massively parallel CPUs without running Windows, though.
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