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Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc)Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc)Posted Aug 23, 2007 23:32 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)In reply to: Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc) by fergal Parent article: Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc) I talked with Matt Domsch at Dell about how the company selects hardware now. They do consider the availability of a kernel.org in-tree GPL driver -- even when selecting parts for a laptop that they're planning to sell with a Microsoft OS. The interesting thing about the Intel hardware is that if you looked at Dell's site a year or so ago, the bottom configuration of a given laptop would have Intel and the top two would require "evil baby-mulching drivers" (as Jon Masters would say). On the latest machine, only the top is EBMD and the rest are Intel. Yes, Intel is doing to Nvidia and ATI in the PC video market what they did to Creative Labs and 3Com in the PC sound and network markets. Bwah ha ha.
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Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc) Posted Aug 24, 2007 9:43 UTC (Fri) by dion (subscriber, #2764) [Link] I so wish you are right about what Intel is doing to ATI and nVidia, but I also feel a little scared that they might now keep being as open as they are now if they end up "owning" the PC completely.
Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc) Posted Aug 24, 2007 12:12 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well Intel does, currently, sell more video cards then AMD and Nvidia combined. So maybe that can help you envision a Intel-only world.
Intel is not our friends, they are corporation and just as greedy. They are just smarter then AMD/ATI and Nvidia and realise that supporting Linux properly is going to help their bottom line. In time Nvidia and AMD will figure this out, I think that AMD probably already knows this but they are mired up their eyeballs in ATI's historical 'Intellectual Property' moronicness. However I don't want it to be a Intel-only world anymore then I want it to be a Broadcom-only world.
As it goes probably both AMD and NVidia are stuck on mistakes from their past involving things like cross-licensing patents, licensing proprietary software from other companies, agreements with Microsoft, DRM-like features , etc etc. They are probably so screwed into the whole deal that they couldn't release open drivers if they wanted to.
As far as performance goes....
Intel IGP chipsets have the edge on Nvidia/AMD products in terms of price, battery life, stability, and compatability. I would not considure buying anything else for a laptop.
Modern Intel drivers for Linux currently lack the mpeg-acceleration XvMC features that makes the hardware perform well on HD-sized video and 3D performance is best described as 'mostly adequate'. It'll play HD stuff if you have a fast enough cpu, no problem. And it will play Quake3-era games and most open source games, no problem. Compiz support is great.
For anything requiring high performance graphics then the only answer is Nvidia video cards, unfortunately.
The principal advantage of Intel IGP is their openness. It has replaced the ATI r200 video cards as the favored choice for X.org developers and Intel has hired several big names from X.org-land to work on their graphics. Such as Keith Packard, principal orginizer behind the X.org-XFree86 fork, creator of the Kdrive drivers, xdamage/composition extensions, xrender, etc. etc.
This should help things like:
When Mesa 7.xx begins hitting Linux distros then you should see a moderate performance boost coming from the Intel camp.
Newer Mesa stuff provides for things like OpenGL 2.1 compatability, properly texture memory management (big deal, especially for shared memory cards like Intel), shader language support, GLSL compiler support, vertex acceleration, and other such things. These improvements should help especially the Intel GMA X3000 and GMA X3100 video cards (what you'd find in newer centrino laptops like the Dell 1420n or the System76 Darter Ultra).
With these improvements and the newer GMA stuff should bring Intel IGP on par with low-to-mid range discrete graphics products coming out of AMD or Nvidia. I don't know this for a fact.
Also another thing I don't know for a fact, but with the Intel Larrebee we should start seeing descrete graphics coming out from Intel in the next couple years.
snippets from wikipedia:
> According to a presentation made by Intel in December 2006, Larrabee will run at 1.7-2.5 GHz and feature 16-24 in-order cores (as opposed to out-of-order) running a modified x86 instruction set, in addition to texure sampling units and other hardware typical of graphics processors.
16-core GPU proccessor that is easily accessable from the OS for other then just 3D tasks sounds good to me.
Linus Torvalds talks future of Linux (apc) Posted Aug 24, 2007 12:42 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] A fairly good articlehttp://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070604-clearing-up...
With Nvidia/AMD/Intel the general trend seems to go towards including these GPUs on the CPU die and making them more general purpose.
Intel seems to be taking the angle of extending x86 (similar to mmx) and making it include GPU-like features were Nvidia/AMD seem to be aiming at making their GPUs more general purpose.
And they are all also aiming for the HPC market.
The scary thing about AMD/ATI and Nvidia is that instead of openning up their hardware for programmers that they are hiding their interfaces behind proprietary software libraries and development environments.
Nvidia has their CUDA environment for C-for-GPUs and AMD has their CTM.
Intel wants to have x86-like, AMD and Nvidia seem to want to use slick and easy-to-use interfaces to abstract away their rapidly-changing GPUs. Something like that. I don't know.
If this trend continues then to be able to even access the all the CPU cores on future systems could be very problematic for Linux. What can you do if your cpu requires proprietary drivers?
I don't understand all of this, I am realy no low-level programmer, but I think it's definately something worth keeping my eye on.
Dell chooses free drivers Posted Aug 24, 2007 16:19 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Wow, that is excellent news. I hope people from AMD, Broadcom and other parts vendors are listening. And I hope HP, Lenovo and other OEMs follow suit.
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