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The claim that AMD, a company with gross profit in the $1 - 2 billion range, does not have the resources to support a dedicated development team that can do a g

• dzhang50 10y ago
  AMD doesn't have "gross profit in the $1 - 2 billion range". They have about $1B in revenue per quarter and have had negative profits (i.e. they lose money) for quite some time now. They were on the verge of bankrupcy about a year ago. Maybe Zen can turn their fortunes around, but they're correct in that they don't have the resources for a dedicated development team right now.
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  • Dylan16807 10y ago
    Writing the software that makes your hardware work is much more of a revenue-based issue than a profit-based issue. Even if you're losing money you need to balance your development budget, and not cut any segment too far.
    • AlphaSite 10y ago
      Their revenue is from Windows, Apple and Cknsoles, not from Linux.
      • duaneb 10y ago
        It's impossible whether to tell if it'd be better if their drivers sucked less. It's certainly a massive barrier to Linux being usable.
    • tw04 10y ago
      Yes, AMD should definitely dedicate an entire team to focusing on writing drivers for desktop Linux. An OS that currently captures less than 1% of the overall desktop gaming market[1]. In other news, McDonald's should really start tailoring their marketing and in-store experience to people making over $10 million/year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_gaming#Market_share_vs._installed_base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_gaming#Market_share_vs._...
      • quetzthecoatl 10y ago
        Isn't it because the high end hardware becoming useless because of the very lack of drivers? Nobody wants to spend lot of money on hardware and don't get to use it optimally. Driver support on platform -> Games released on platform -> Gamers using the platform.
        • notalaser 10y ago
          Linux drivers on the nVidia side are OK. I've had excellent performance, and no trouble with them for what I think are already 10 years now, if not more. Lack of driver support is not what's stopping people from releasing Linux games.
          • Certhas 10y ago
            And they are closed source. AMD tried to go open source and upstream and found out that that is not viable, because they would need to duplicate a lot of work in order to avoid putting abstractions in the kernel. The upshot is, kernel developers have been complaining about nVidia lots for the route they took. When I install Linux on a reasonably recent desktop I still have to fiddle with boot options and/or blacklist the nouveau driver for some nVidia cards. And now nVidias approach has been completely vindicated.
            • hashhar 10y ago
              This. Exactly this. The treatment AMD got from LKML was slightly deserved but doing that they alienated a hardware partner and indirectly set the precedent for doing closed source binary releases that use HAL anyway. It sucks for the consumers and that's what drives the installed base of Linux.
  • lvs 10y ago
    It does, in fact, report around the gross profit I specified. Why don't you look at the financials [1]. I think many people in this thread, including you, don't know what the term "gross profit" means. [1] http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-fundIncomeA http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-fundIncomeA
    • tankenmate 10y ago
      But just because they have a seemingly sufficient gross margin doesn't mean they don't have significant unavoidable costs that can't neatly be attributed to cost of sales.
    • peller 10y ago
      I had to look it up. And you're right, I didn't know what the accountants think gross profit means. The thing is, gross profit doesn't include operating expenses[0]: "rent, equipment, inventory costs, marketing, payroll, insurance and funds allocated toward research and development."[1] As you can see on the page you linked, for a company like AMD, their operating expenses are huge. And that's not even including expenses from taxes and debts. So the number we really want, and what I imagine most people are thinking you meant, is net income. Which, you'll notice is sadly rather negative. [0] http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/031015/what-difference-between-gross-profit-operating-profit-and-net-income.asp http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/031015/what-differen... [1] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/operating_expense.asp http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/operating_expense.asp
    • samfisher83 10y ago
      Gross profits don't include things like R&D and Sales just the Revenue - cost of goods sold. They have a negative net profit margin. They are hemorrhaging cash, and have a lot of debt. The have negative share holder equity. They are in a bad financial position. Therefore it is kind of commendable they have some one trying to improve their linux drivers. They can't just "Afford" to just throw more people at the problem because of their financial issues.
  • mangeletti 10y ago
    Maybe this is why their net is negative; because they don't allocate money to the right things.
    • c0nfused 10y ago
      In my experience supporting Linux desktop is hardly ever the right thing. Example: ubutnu cannot consistently ship a version of network manager that supports reconnecting to a wifi network suspend with out being manually restarted. I suspect that at a dollar value there is most no point but I don't have access to enough data to prove it.
      • angry_octet 10y ago
        Your example re wifi is not great, works fine for me. Dell hardware.
      • anonbanker 10y ago
        > Lennart Poettering's NetworkManager Your experience is limited, and tainted. wpa-supplicant by itself can accomplish what you desire; NetworkManager (poorly) adds three or four extra layers of abstraction on top of that. Meanwhile, Wicd and connman do exactly what you need, and don't constantly crash while doing it. Blame ubuntu for following Red Hat's lead, and using their "solutions" to the problem.
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• AlisdairO 10y ago
  The use of gross profit here is severely misleading. AMD has famously been losing money for a long time - they made a loss of half a billion last year.
  • appleiigs 10y ago
    "they made a loss of half a billion last year" Even that is misleading... More recently, AMD lost $406 million between June to Sept 2016.
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• Fr0styMatt88 10y ago
  That may have been true of their driver quality in the past, but it's really not so true now. On Windows, their constant work at improving drivers, leading up to the release of their Crimson driver software, has been evident over the last two years. I have not had an AMD driver issue since maybe late last year (when there was a persistent incompatibility for a long time between Oculus Rift and the drivers). I run a dual-GPU card (R9-295X2) so my setup isn't exactly vanilla either (admittedly though I only use a single monitor, multi-monitor seems to have been a persistent pain point for people). I can understand AMD wanting to unify their codebase. I agree with the parent that they shouldn't worry so much about upstreaming into the kernel. I think their HAL approach is the right engineering one, given the constraints that their team is working under. The team seems to be trying to do the best with what they've been given. Also, hasn't the graphics division been spun-off into a separate company now (Radeon Graphics Group)? Or is it just a more focused internal division within AMD?
  • anonbanker 10y ago
    In The Thread: Windows users thinking improved windows performance somehow equates to improved linux driver quality. Their paid developers are being outclassed by volunteers who write more solid drivers. Somehow this doesn't sink in.
    • koffiezet 10y ago
      > In The Thread: Windows users thinking improved windows performance somehow equates to improved linux driver quality. Well, as far as I understood, that's exactly what the entire discussion is about: their HAL that would allow them to reuse large parts of their well optimized and tested Windows code and integrating that into the kernel.
      • anonbanker 10y ago
        > well-optimized Later in the dri-devel thread, they even admit that DC isn't even being used in the Windows drivers, because by the time the software devs get to write drivers, the hardware devs they should be hooking up with have already moved to the latest/greatest thing, and can't be bothered with legacy. AMD's drivers are far from "well-optimized", and their internal developer culture perpetuates this problem.
• drite 10y ago
  You've confused revenue with profit. They are not the same thing. AMD has been losing money for most of its existence and almost went bankrupt on a number of occasions. This renders your points completely invalid.
  • wfunction 10y ago
    For those of us out of the loop, if AMD has been "losing money for most of its existence" and "almost went bankrupt on a number of occasions", then how is it still alive? Did it make a ridiculous amount of money at some points?
    • nradov 10y ago
      You can see a table of AMD quarterly net income back to 2004 here. https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/net_income_ttm https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/net_income_ttm
    • Lazare 10y ago
      AMD has had ups and downs, but over the past 15 years they've had a net loss of $7 billion. Yes, they've had some good years too. They made over a billion dollars in 2000 alone, and they've been knocking around since 1969. And they've been written off for dead many, many times. That being said, the current situation is bleak, and no, they never made a ridiculous amount of money. They've had to go to pretty extreme lengths not to go under already (eg, selling off their headquarters building, then leasing it back, just to scrape together some quick cash). They're very, very cash strapped. So much so that the news they signed a somewhat nebulous licensing deal with a Chinese company to help them make servers caused their share price to jump 52%, just because they'd be getting ~$300m in licensing fees.
      • wfunction 10y ago
        Thanks! But I still don't understand how they're still alive? How can you lose billions of dollars and still be in business? Are they borrowing the money from someone? Where is the money they don't have coming from?
• chris_wot 10y ago
  The funny thing is, had they followed some of the subclassing practices already in the kernel, it sounds like they could have had cleaner, more easily testable code with what from what I can tell tends to giv them a pretty unified interface. The belie, however, is an appalling response really: I realize you care about code quality and style, but do you care about stable functionality? Would you really merge a bunch of huge cleanups that would potentially break tons of stuff in subtle ways because coding style is that important? I'm done with that myself. I've merged too many half-baked cleanups and new features in the past and ended up spending way more time fixing them than I would have otherwise for relatively little gain. The hw is just too complicated these days. At some point people what support for the hw they have and they want it to work. If code trumps all, then why do we have staging? Wut? If you want stable functionality, then you follow the kernel conventions, practices and coding styles. This whole screed equates to: "We've got some code we've put together in our silo, you amateurs who want perfection are wrong and our unified layers and push to get our processors to market mean you can't comment on our code." The bit about cleanups makes little sense to me, they seem to have some fundamental issues baked into their code that will necessitate these very cleanups...
  • mcpherrinm 10y ago
    I think the argument here is that stability is gained from having code shared as closely as possible with the Windows codebase, which is where most of the QA work happens, and what the real experts debugging their ASICs use. From a hardware and driver development standpoint, I think that makes a decent amount of sense. Hardware is often weird and quirky, so making sure you handle all the edge cases in two different codebases is a lot harder than doing it once. Certainly too much work for a handful of people who just want to plug their code into Linux. Stability here is on the driver/hardware interaction, not the kernel/driver boundary, which is what the kernel folks seem to care about, naturally.
    • chris_wot 10y ago
      Stability for whom? Trying to contort Linux code to follow the practices that work well for Windows does not strike me as either maintainable, or even particularly stable!