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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how that proposal would go inside a corporation - "we need to rewrite our driver at huge development costs instead of further competing with nVidia because we need to make OS developers of marginal market importance happy".

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One of the problems for AMD is that everybody uses nVidia for computing, and nobody uses AMD. One of the reasons is thaf they have been ignoring non-mainstream GPU market. Well, those non-mainstream markets become mainstream and if you fall behind it is almost impossible to catch up. I personally prefer AMD's GPUs for computing and prefer OpenCL to CUDA. But, they are minor, since nvidia has much better software offering. AMD absolutely need to offer superb Linux story if they want to get people to use their hardware for computing instead of nvidia. They need Linux more than Linux needs them.

This. 100 times this.

AMD used to have much a much better hardware story for compute. I don't know how it looks now, but nVidia have absolutely stolen the market due, in part, to their excellent software -- even on Linux.

My only experience of compute on AMD was a FirePro v7900 -- an expensive, workstation-class card. With both the latest, and the 'workstation-class' Catalyst Linux drivers, my LuxMark tests came out very vast, but very red.

With nVidia, I can simply add a repo to my Ubuntu machine and have the latest stable drivers every time I do a dist-upgrade. If I want a solid, tested CUDA dev environment, I can install the CUDA repo and do likewise.

AMD have to make sure the end-user experience with these cards is as smooth as that, and that everything works.

I really hope AMDGPU-PRO is that experience. I haven't tried it yet, so I can't comment.

It's easy to dismiss enthusiasts / hobbyists / developers / gamers as a 'small market'. There was no 'pro gamer' market until ~10 years ago. Now there are entire companies built off the back of it. AMD cannot continue to leave a sour taste in end-users' mouths, otherwise there might not be any left soon.

And part of that is because Linux nVidia drivers are on-par quality wise with Windows. Because it's the same codebase and they develop it lockstep.

AMD it seems won't be able to do that now.

> AMD it seems won't be able to do that now.

Yes they can, they'll just have to commit resources to keeping up with kernel changes instead of having it done for them upstream. You can't have your cake and eat it as well.

nVidia has it. All they did is close off the drivers completely and not listen to kernel devs. Seems to be working out for them very well.

Is that the lesson we want to give to companies?

If you want the kernel devs to maintain your code, it has to be maintainable. If not, you have to fix it yourself every time the kernel changes. That's the cost NVIDIA pays for their abomination.

They can still do it. If they don't have resources for further development, then just ship it out of kernel as a separate patch/driver for now. That way it will still be open source and will be included in Ubuntu, Archlinux, etc.

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