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Comment by bitigchi | Hacker News Reader

For more context, this effort is mostly lead by X512, the wunderkid, who ported Haiku to RISC-V platform singlehandedly, and a long time Haiku contributor already. The patches are not upstreamed yet, and it currently only supports Radeon Southern Islands cards, planned to be expanded for Intel and other AMD cards in the future.

If you would like to contribute, feel free to drop by the forums, and say hi!

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Southern Islands? Like on those Sandy Bridge Macbook Pros?

It refers to their HD 7000 series, the predecessor of Polaris (RX 4xx and 5xx): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_HD_7000_series

The RX/R designation doesn't actually say much about the underlying architecture, Polaris is GCN 4, while HD 7000 is ... a mixture. Most HD 7000 cards are first gen GCN, though some are TeraScale 1/2, which would required very different driver support.

I guess it doesn't "matter" to consumers buying a product, but it is unfortunate how confusing the naming schemes are versus the underlying architecture. The R9/R8 cards were similarly a mixture of GCN 1, 2, 3, and even TeraScale.

(similarly, the RX 5xx/4xx series has GCN 1 and GCN 3 cards mixed in, in addition to the actual GCN 4 chips)

Thanks for the clarification, much appreciated! So it is the same mess just as with their CPU names.

It's really annoying because what you said is correct most of the time, and broadly speaking "HD 7000 is southern isles".

Except for the ones that aren't. And it's not even chronological -- the HD 7510 with a TeraScale 2 chip was released after some southern isles cards.

And there's the Radeon HD 7790, which has a GCN 2 sea isles chip.

I became aware of this because my "R9 280x" turned out to essentially be an upclocked HD 7970, using a Tahiti/southern isles chip. GPU was fine, it's just a nuisance to sift through what's what...

Thanks, I’m really dabbling in the AMD nomenclature.

Trying to discern if my gpu is better supported by radeon or amdgpu gives me headaches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_HD_7000_series

Those (https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/amd-whistler.g103) are Northern Islands (GFX4), really old stuff.

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