What Do You Need? | Hacker News Reader

What Do You Need?

developer.amd.com

68 pointsnreece21 comments

Hey everyone. Truthfully, I wasn't expecting this much passion, and it's great! I will be hauling in all the feedback and distributing to various development teams. If I get useful info that I can share on anything in particular I'll come back with it. THANK YOU.

Better Linux drivers. Open source and integrated into the mainline linux kernel.

This can't be stressed enough.

How about public docs so everyone can write their drivers?

Good, public docs and permissively licensed free drivers that can be used or cross-checked against by anyone.

It is already mentioned in his beloved developer forum[0], but he didn't respond yet. Let's see...

[0]http://devgurus.amd.com/message/1306586#1306586

Linux/BSD support is literally the reason I just bought an Nvidia card to replace my old Radeon.

This. Right now, I stick to buying laptops with Intel graphics chipsets to incur the least pain.

Enhanced compilers specifically for AMD chips, in the same spirit as Intel's ICC. Except open source, ideally, based on LLVM/GCC. I'm guessing this would let me take (more) advantage of the greater raw core count on Opteron vs Xeon. At least it would be an arguing point in favor of AMD--the only one I can see now is cost.

Sounds like you're advocating a different compiler ("based on"). Why not contribute directly to LLVM or GCC?

Are there optimizations they'd need to do that are incompatible with the wider goals of the open source project? I'm assuming the projects would be happy to accept new optimizations.

CPU Stuff: I want an ARM CPU or at least board with an ARM CPU with full SATA support and memory sockets if possible that I can buy for less than 100$. Big wig clients are fine and everybody likes the big contracts, but you are severely underestimating the "Prosumer" market. The Raspberry Pi is NOT a passing fad.

GPU Stuff: 1 - Driver support for "legacy" chipsets:

I have a M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 mobo with HD4290 integrated GPU since 2010 and to my surprise when I installed Windows 8.1 on it this year, found out that AMD doesn't have any driver support for this GPU for Windows 8. Really? Are we still in the age of "that's so last week.."?

2 - Linux drivers:

So I bought an Radeon 270X, Windows 8 support was fine, but Ubuntu? oh my.. Only about a month or so and after another one of failing at life I was able to install the catalyst drivers (in beta) correctly and boot it.

The Reddit discussion linked to int he comments is informative.

Direct link: https://pay.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lda53/amd_is_...

I own an AMD system because I wanted many cheap cores. That was the Bulldozer USP, in my opinion. And it delivers. So why not drive the ecosystem around applications that gobble up cores? Not all compute workloads need a GPU e.g.back testing trading strategies, parallel searching and sorting, iterative machine learning etc. If I were you I would also fund the creation of some industry standard benchmarks in each of these application areas that benefit from many cheap cores.

Maybe prepend an "AMD requests feedback: " to the title?

Pretty vague as it stands now ["What Do You Need?" (" Concrete titles?")]

The (amd.com) in parenthesis clarified the title somewhat, for me at least.

I saw that as well. I was expecting a bad product pitch ("Whatcha need? Doesn't matter, don't even answer: our new $Thing does it all")

(Such a cynic)

A language for parallelism to get full power of the CPU, a lot of cores, low consumption, long life product, easy to extend and adapt, free drivers, easily adaptable for mobile.

Working with Xamarin and Microsoft to boost C# GPU and CPU programming capabilities.

Datasheets and revision guide publicly available for all AMD chipsets.

Hardware Transactional Memory.

EDITED: Sorry for the inflammatory comment. I deserved that downvote.

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