Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 1, 2007 17:15 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com) by nim-nim
Parent article: Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

>>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] (2 responses)

> 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 (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

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