Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 1, 2007 10:23 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com) by pizza
Parent article: Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

> Um, no, it wouldn't affect their sales by anything more than rounding errors.

I give it half a year more at best before enterprise buyers notice that in addition to not leading the performance game anymore, AMD servers are bundled with gfx ships which are a PITA to use (in contrast with the built-in Intel FLOSS support) Then the painstakingly acquired AMD positions in the lucrative enterprise market will finish evaporating

A lot of server stuff like Oracle needs X to be setup/managed, and AMD/ATI has long relied on old (but well-supported) RageXL ships on its server lines. However those will have to be cleared eventually. And AMD has nothing to replace them with because of its "no-support" stance (good luck trying to shoehorn drivers in RHEL at the last minute - if they're not in Fedora today they won't hit RHEL for years)

Enterprise users will *not* play the closed driver dance like gamers. They have better things to spend money on

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Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 1, 2007 12:54 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

AMD/ATI has long relied on old (but well-supported) RageXL ships on its server lines. However those will have to be cleared eventually.

Why ? Are they not enough for Oracle or what ? It's quite cheap to produce new set of chips once you have masks available - and I've not seen ATI's plans to destroy them. Till the Windows Server 2008 (and probably even beyond) RageXL will be enough...

Enterprise users will *not* play the closed driver dance like gamers.

I know a lot of "enterprise uses" who use ATI's and NVidia's binary drivers on desktop - and RageXL is enough for server for many-many years, so I fail to see where you come from.

You are correct when you are saying "enterprise is different": I never seen retail x86 motherboards which are usable without any VGA card (not even RageXL), but I've seen such system used in clusters - not a big incentive for ATI or NVidia to "open up"...

Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 1, 2007 13:37 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

> It's quite cheap to produce new set of chips once you have masks available

sure, but they have to play well with new memory formats, new buses, etc Life support can only continue so long, and LongHorn server is going to require new stuff anyway (and even if no one really wants it, enterprises are going to require hardware compatibility before it's even released just in case)

>I know a lot of "enterprise uses" who use ATI's and NVidia's binary drivers on desktop

Only true while there's no performing alternative, and Intel is busy ramping up it's offerings

> I've seen such system used in clusters

clusters are their own market segment, you can't generalize from them

Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 1, 2007 17:15 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

>>I know a lot of "enterprise uses" who use ATI's and NVidia's binary drivers on desktop

>Only true while there's no performing alternative, and Intel is busy ramping up it's offerings

Until Intel starts selling standalone graphics chips (ie non-shared memory) their offerings will never be considered by server manufacturers, simply because of the performance hit due to contention on the memory bus.

Desktop is another matter; but on that front Intel is already is the largest vendor of graphics chipsets, marketshare-wise.

Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 1, 2007 17:32 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

> Until Intel starts selling standalone graphics chips (ie non-shared
> memory) their offerings will never be considered by server manufacturers,

yes, sure, that's why the speed daemon RageXL is is so popular on servers

Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 3, 2007 7:23 UTC (Mon) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

The point isn't how fast the graphics chip is; servers won't be doing graphics operations. What counts is whether its load on the memory bus slows down CPU operations. Just refreshing the display does that. A properly configured server would have the display driver stop refreshing the display after a period of mouse/keyboard inactivity. Does anybody do that?

Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 3, 2007 7:27 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

The intel driver has all sort of low-power tricks because it also targets laptop users

Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 1, 2007 17:30 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

>Enterprise users will *not* play the closed driver dance like gamers. They have better things to spend money on

Um, no. "Enterprise users" will use whatever is necessary for their (often proprietary) apps to run as cheaply as possible for a given performance target.

For "enterprise desktop" users, onboard shared-memory graphics is good enough. How much power do you need for a web browser + email? It's for this reason that Intel is already the largest graphics chipset vendor, simply because it's already built into their core chipsets.

For "enterprise servers", there will be a discrete onboard graphics chip (RageXL is a favorite) to avoid the performance hit of shared-memory. It can be a dumb framebuffer, because graphical performance is completely irrelevant when there's nobody sitting at its console.

"enterprise users" who need 3D performance (eg CAD, Hollywood, etc) will pay lots and lots of $$$ for a fast, certified, hardware+driver combo which is highly proprietary. They're already running non-free software; why would they care about a non-free driver too?

Meanwhile, RageXL will be around as long as server motherboards have old-school PCI.

Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 1, 2007 20:19 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

How much power do you need for a web browser + email?

Quite a lot, as it turned out. I don't use 3D in my work at all, yet I've ended up with quite powerful NVidia card (binary driver, of course): simpler offerings just can not handle HP LP3065...

Server graphics

Posted Sep 20, 2007 8:13 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link]

Actually RageXL has been replaced by ES1000 on all servers we have bought lately (for Intel and for AMD CPUs). The free Radeon driver works on the ES1000 (which is apparently a Radeon 7000 or somesuch). We run them in text mode, though.