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Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)Posted Sep 1, 2007 12:54 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com) by nim-nim Parent article: Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)
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"...
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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
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