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:
http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2007/05/mesa-and-llvm.html
A effort on getting better compiler support for GPUs. I wonder how it's going...

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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(GPU)

snippets from wikipedia:
> Larrabee is different from its predecessors in that it uses a derivative of the x86 instruction set for its shader cores instead of a custom graphics-oriented instruction set, and is expected to be more flexible.

> 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.