

AMD dismisses numerous open source developers   - manish_gill
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/AMD-dismisses-numerous-open-source-developers-1745131.html

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compilercreator
People may also want to check out the official response from AMD over at the
Register. Link:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/07/amd_closes_german_os...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/07/amd_closes_german_osrc_lab/)

Part of the response: " We will continue to support the Linux kernel, and the
software development work happening at the OSRC is being consolidated and will
be performed at other AMD locations."

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rmk2
This still seems incredibly vague, though.

The radeon driver is part of the kernel, as well... And how exactly they will
"consolidate and perform" the cpu-related work in other locations without the
people who have been working on it is a bit of a mystery to me.

I don't understand how this is supposed to work. ARM or x86, if they want
servers, they will need good Linux support. Who's going to provide that is
everyone's guess...

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VMG
As somebody who recently sent back a notebook because Linux driver support for
Radeon is abysmal and now is a happy Intel graphics user, this doesn't
surprise me at all. More power to Intel.

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jklio
The same is true for me, I will continue to buy Intel CPUs and motherboards,
for both desktop and mobile, until someone else takes open source graphics
drivers as seriously as they do.

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VMG
or even drivers in generals - I'd still prefer closed but working NVIDIA
drivers over the crap that ATI puts out

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stephengillie
This has been a major pain point for the Linux community since the Radeon
days. It's such a shame, because ATI had a huge opportunity to steal that
market from nVidia back then. Instead, maximizing value away from users and
toward shareholders left us with a video-diminished Linux community.

~~~
acdha
Given how many thousands of dollars we steered to Intel because of it, I'm not
sure this maximized shareholder value either. Few things businesses do are
actually big-picture decisions.

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raverbashing
Unfortunately it seems recovery of AMD now depends on very smart people that
are not there anymore

Looks like they gave up after settling with Intel (and some years of bad
management)

To be fair Intel also abandoned their idiotic race for MHz which fixed things
for them.

Maybe their investment in ARM servers may be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Every computer at a store today is fast enough for 99% of people.

~~~
mariusmg
"Every computer at a store today is fast enough for 99% of people."

Nope. Shitty laptops with 5400 rpm old hdds, 2 GB of ram and old turion/core
CPUs will NEVER be "fast enough".

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raverbashing
It is a good machine for typing school papers and checking Facebook and
Youtube

You're overestimating what most people do with their computers

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GFischer
I actually have exactly that setup (shitty Gateway with Turion and 5400 rpm
hdd, dirt cheap).

It works well enough for what I need it to do - surf the web, Office,
Facebook, Youtube, Plants vs Zombies, movies, - heck it has an HDMI port. And
I've been able to do some light programming on it without trouble.

Only thing it really doesn't do is non-casual games.

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nickporter
"OSRC staff primarily worked to develop the Linux support for AMD's server
processor"

It's almost like they want to fail. Do they expect their hardware to run
Windows Server or something? Thankfully, the linux developers they're letting
go won't have trouble finding jobs.

AMD stocks are unsurprisingly going down (as they have been doing for a while
now). See <https://www.google.ca/finance?q=NYSE:AMD>

