The good side of ATI/AMD

[Entity`]

For those of you who have already figured this out... Don't listen. For everyone else I have something to share. Many of us know that AMD bought ATI for unknown reasons ($$$). For some, this spells the end of a good company. That is only slightly true. The only thing I see that they lost was a name and colors. But for others this will be exciting. What we will gain from this is kick-*** drivers for our ATI/AMD cards. Why, because AMD has spent millions of time, $$$, and workers just so every single one of there products is 120% compatible with every operating system out there in the world (except for old, crusty, and decrepit ones of years past). Theres more, surely but i have to go and eat lunch.

Bye Bye now.

[zachtib]

For those of you who have already figured this out... Don't listen. For everyone else I have something to share. Many of us know that AMD bought ATI for unknown reasons ($$$). For some, this spells the end of a good company. That is only slightly true. The only thing I see that they lost was a name and colors. But for others this will be exciting. What we will gain from this is kick-*** drivers for our ATI/AMD cards. Why, because AMD has spent millions of time, $$$, and workers just so every single one of there products is 120% compatible with every operating system out there in the world (except for old, crusty, and decrepit ones of years past). Theres more, surely but i have to go and eat lunch.

Bye Bye now.

I'm still excited at the possibility of something good coming from this.

Best case scenario for Linux is for AMD to open the specifications, not the drivers, of their video cards and chipsets, enough so that good open source drivers can be written, but not enough to violate any potential NDAs. Then, if AMD were to partner with someone such as Atheros, and release their rumored "Centrino" platform, it would be a boon for Linux, as we'd be able to have a platform with great open source driver support.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that very few people were to complain if AMD killed off the fglrx driver altogether, and instead provided enough information and/or help to open source developers, such as the people who developed the radeon oss driver, to create drivers for ATI cards.

And then if they added support for LinuxBIOS on some notebooks, it would only get better.

[prizrak]

For those of you who have already figured this out... Don't listen. For everyone else I have something to share. Many of us know that AMD bought ATI for unknown reasons ($$$). For some, this spells the end of a good company. That is only slightly true. The only thing I see that they lost was a name and colors. But for others this will be exciting. What we will gain from this is kick-*** drivers for our ATI/AMD cards. Why, because AMD has spent millions of time, $$$, and workers just so every single one of there products is 120% compatible with every operating system out there in the world (except for old, crusty, and decrepit ones of years past). Theres more, surely but i have to go and eat lunch.

Bye Bye now.

I don't mean to sound harsh, but if you did even a little tiny bit of research you would know that there was a good reason for AMD to get ATI and it has not a damn thing to do with Linux. The reason was Intel. In case you don't know Intel is capable of providing fully integrated Intel systems. That includes, a board with an Intel chipset that can handle both audio and video, wireless and wired networking and the all powerful Intel CPU of course. Currently AMD only offers CPU's. Purchasing ATI gives them two things, an in-house chipset solution and in-house integrated video. They still don't have networking but at least there is something.

It also gives them a good way of breaking into the high end gaming market. While Intel makes great CPU's and both ATI and nVidia provide awesome GPU boards, I suspect that an AMD based solution with an ATI chipset and ATI video board would be optimized to work together and perhaps give better performance than Intel + ATI/nVidia could.

As far as any possible impact on Linux goes. The only thing we might get is better binary drivers but that's about it. We won't get open drivers, I can guarantee you that not even in 2D. Basically there is no difference for us Linux users.