5 ms·

That might not even be overstatement. The last few big desktop linux crash-and-burns I've run into all had display drivers as a common component. I like back-f

That might not even be overstatement. The last few big desktop linux crash-and-burns I've run into all had display drivers as a common component. I like back-foot, underdog NVIDIA. Ascendent AMD hasn't drawn my ire yet, let's hope power corrupts slowly.

mlyle 4y ago
> I like back-foot, underdog NVIDIA. Ascendent AMD hasn't drawn my ire yet, let's hope power corrupts slowly. That "back-foot" "underdog" nVidia has the edge in the video market still... and 3x the market cap of AMD.
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  APUs are eating the market of novideo, see e.g. the performance of the M1 iGPU
  - eru 4y ago
    Are APUs different from what we used to call integrated graphics cards?
    - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
      The difference is getting blurry. Apus have generally better communication/latency/shared resources with the CPU. The ultimate ideal of an APU is to have a unified memory with the CPU, which is the case in e.g the PS3/PS4 Despite progress in heterogenous computing (the neglected HSA), in SOCs, 3D ingerposers, high bandwidth buses interconnects and 3D memory such as HBM, the PC platform has yet to see a proper APU. In fact the M1 is probably the closest thing to an ideal APU on the market. But yes the more time pass, the more the term IGPU denote APU. AMD bought ATI because of the fusion vision, the idea that sharing silicon, resources and memory between the CPU and the GPU would be the future of computing. An unrelated but very underrated is the egpu. Egpus are external to the pc unlike a dgpu. So you can buy a thin laptop, connect it via Thunderbolt to a rtx 3080 and enjoy faster gpu performance than allowed on any laptop on the market, and enjoy a thin lightweight, silent laptop the rest of the time. Disclaimer Thunderbolt is still a moderate limiting factor in reaching peak performance.
      - kllrnohj 4y ago
        > the PC platform has yet to see a proper APU Wat. AMD literally invented the term 'APU' and has been shipping them since 2011. Fully unified CPU+GPU memory since 2014's Kavari. That's full cache coherent CPU & GPU along with the GPU using the same shared virtual pageable memory as the CPU. The M1 didn't add anything new to the mix.
        SemanticStrengh 4y ago
        It's a spectrum. I don't think that cache coherency was useable by developers/compilers. The two only ways I know (HMM and HSA) are niche, used by nobody. GPGPU compute would GREATLY benefit from programs that can share memory between cpu and gou without having to do needless high latency round-trips and copies. So they failed in practice. They never did a CPU addressable HBM interposer (despite having invented HBM) unlike what I believe is the M1.
      - eru 4y ago
        > An unrelated but very underrated is the egpu. Egpus are external to the pc unlike a dgpu. So you can buy a thin laptop, connect it via Thunderbolt to a rtx 3080 and enjoy faster gpu performance than allowed on any laptop on the market, and enjoy a thin lightweight, silent laptop the rest of the time. Disclaimer Thunderbolt is still a moderate limiting factor in reaching peak performance. Not just for laptops: this sounds also a bit like what the Switch dock could have been. (And in some sense, it reminds me of Super FX chip for the SNES.)
    - boardwaalk 4y ago
      APUs are AMD-speak for CPU and GPU on the same die (Intel has similar but doesn't call them that). Integrated graphics cards (a misnomer since there is no card -- IGP or iGPU is probably more accurate) may or may not be on the same die (instead could be on the motherboard, particularly in the chipset). That design is pretty rare/antiquated at this point though. Being on the same die means higher bandwidth, lower latency, etc.
      - mepian 4y ago
        I think Intel calls them XPUs.
    - Qwertious 4y ago
      Integrated video cards were integrated onto the motherboard. APUs/iGPUs are integrated into the CPU.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  It's fair to extrapolate because their strategic decisions will be based on extrapolations. NVIDIA had to overclock and hustle the current generation of cards and it's looking even worse for the next generation. Software was a moat when AMD was heavily resource constrained, but now they can afford the headcount to give chase. Between the chip shortage and crypto, there was plenty of noise on top of fundamentals, but one doesn't make strategic plans based on noise. This is all speculative, of course. I'm sure if asked they would say it was a total coincidence. Just like AMD and Intel switching places on their stance towards overclocking. Complete coincidence that it matches the optimal strategy for their market position -- "milk it" vs "give chase." Somehow it always seems to match, though, and speculation is fun :)
  - urthor 4y ago
    NVIDIA is well, well ahead of AMD. NVIDIA's cards were faster than AMD's with the huge gap in transistor density that was the Samsung fab. Don't get excited for the AMD graphics division up in Canada.
    - dralley 4y ago
      >NVIDIA's cards were faster than AMD's with the huge gap in transistor density that was the Samsung fab. They are roughly at par. AMD does better at lower resolutions because of their cache setup. With the refreshed cards, AMD is slightly ahead.
      - urthor 4y ago
        Keep in mind that is at a particular price point. NVIDIA's top of the range chip is ahead of AMD's, and the 3080's SKU is at a lower binning point on the bell curve than the 6950's. Hence NVIDIA would be able to maintain a performance per watt crown at the 6950's price point if it sold its highest bins cheaper. Given the gap in transistor density, that is an exorbitant architectural delta.
  - TomVDB 4y ago
    I wish my company were in the same desperate situation as Nvidia. One where we’d be faster than the competition with similar perf/W while using a much inferior silicon process…
lawl 4y ago
Amd changed their windows drivers to not output video if it detects its running in a VM. Nvidia went the other way and stopped doing so. Both can/could be bypassed with some libvirtd xml magic, but still. Nvidia seem to slowly stop being assholes, AMD started already.
- namlem 4y ago
  The cycle continues
- brezelgoring 4y ago
  >Amd changed their windows drivers to not output video if it detects its running in a VM. What? Why?
  - lawl 4y ago
    Presumably market segmentation. You're only allowed VMs that dont feel like shit (i.e. have gpu accel) if you pay for enterprise vGPU shit. Can't have someone buy two of your GPUs to give one to a VM, obviously.
    - kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
      > pay for enterprise vGPU For AMD the driver is difficult to find and poorly documented (and only available on ESXi unlike NVIDIA vGPU support for Xen, Hyper-V, KVM, Nutanix, and ESXi, etc.). At least the guest drivers don't have licensing issues unlike with NVIDIA IIUC.
      - my123 4y ago
        And very few AMD GPUs even support it... (and good luck finding a remotely recent AMD GIM driver)
        snvzz 4y ago
        Plus the quality of the overall experience. And I understand NVIDIA is even worse re: GPU virtualization. The end result is that it is unusable in practice. Very difficult and restricted to few CPUs/GPUs and very specific software chain. Otherwise, it'd be open source, universally available and trivial to use. The good news is that I understand this support is actually good on the Intel side, and Intel has promised that they will actually release competitive GPUs soon. Should this truly be the case, it will automatically make Intel the go-to for GPU virtualization, and might help motivate NVIDIA/AMD to stop segmenting re: GPU virtualization, ending this shitty situation.
washadjeffmad 4y ago
Just had my first graphics stack issue since 2013 upgrading to Fedora 36 and was caught flat-footed. I've got multiple GPUs, so now I've got to figure out if it's Wayland, amdgpu, nouveau (since unblacklisting), or dkms. "Just working" has made me lazy.
- rawoke083600 4y ago
  Was in similar boat recently, I'm not that up to day with the whole X11 vs Wayland, but dammit am I mad ! I feel like JUST as the "Linux X11 Discrete Graphics Scenario" started to become more stable and less (not none, but less) of an issue to setup and upgrade without getting black screens, the Linux-world is now turning to a "new windowing server" i.e Wayland, we starting all over again sigh Maybe the answer to having a decent and carefree discrete graphics Linux stack is to fork (Don't you dare link to the XKCD comic about 'Standards') SteamOS. They are at least motivated (as it's part of their core product) to make it work most of the time. And have a done boat load of good work for Linux ecosystem. Well done guys ! :)

mlyle 4y ago

> I like back-foot, underdog NVIDIA. Ascendent AMD hasn't drawn my ire yet, let's hope power corrupts slowly. That "back-foot" "underdog" nVidia has the edge in the video market still... and 3x the market cap of AMD.

SemanticStrengh 4y ago
APUs are eating the market of novideo, see e.g. the performance of the M1 iGPU
- eru 4y ago
  Are APUs different from what we used to call integrated graphics cards?
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    The difference is getting blurry. Apus have generally better communication/latency/shared resources with the CPU. The ultimate ideal of an APU is to have a unified memory with the CPU, which is the case in e.g the PS3/PS4 Despite progress in heterogenous computing (the neglected HSA), in SOCs, 3D ingerposers, high bandwidth buses interconnects and 3D memory such as HBM, the PC platform has yet to see a proper APU. In fact the M1 is probably the closest thing to an ideal APU on the market. But yes the more time pass, the more the term IGPU denote APU. AMD bought ATI because of the fusion vision, the idea that sharing silicon, resources and memory between the CPU and the GPU would be the future of computing. An unrelated but very underrated is the egpu. Egpus are external to the pc unlike a dgpu. So you can buy a thin laptop, connect it via Thunderbolt to a rtx 3080 and enjoy faster gpu performance than allowed on any laptop on the market, and enjoy a thin lightweight, silent laptop the rest of the time. Disclaimer Thunderbolt is still a moderate limiting factor in reaching peak performance.
    - kllrnohj 4y ago
      > the PC platform has yet to see a proper APU Wat. AMD literally invented the term 'APU' and has been shipping them since 2011. Fully unified CPU+GPU memory since 2014's Kavari. That's full cache coherent CPU & GPU along with the GPU using the same shared virtual pageable memory as the CPU. The M1 didn't add anything new to the mix.
      - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
        It's a spectrum. I don't think that cache coherency was useable by developers/compilers. The two only ways I know (HMM and HSA) are niche, used by nobody. GPGPU compute would GREATLY benefit from programs that can share memory between cpu and gou without having to do needless high latency round-trips and copies. So they failed in practice. They never did a CPU addressable HBM interposer (despite having invented HBM) unlike what I believe is the M1.
    - eru 4y ago
      > An unrelated but very underrated is the egpu. Egpus are external to the pc unlike a dgpu. So you can buy a thin laptop, connect it via Thunderbolt to a rtx 3080 and enjoy faster gpu performance than allowed on any laptop on the market, and enjoy a thin lightweight, silent laptop the rest of the time. Disclaimer Thunderbolt is still a moderate limiting factor in reaching peak performance. Not just for laptops: this sounds also a bit like what the Switch dock could have been. (And in some sense, it reminds me of Super FX chip for the SNES.)
  - boardwaalk 4y ago
    APUs are AMD-speak for CPU and GPU on the same die (Intel has similar but doesn't call them that). Integrated graphics cards (a misnomer since there is no card -- IGP or iGPU is probably more accurate) may or may not be on the same die (instead could be on the motherboard, particularly in the chipset). That design is pretty rare/antiquated at this point though. Being on the same die means higher bandwidth, lower latency, etc.
    - mepian 4y ago
      I think Intel calls them XPUs.
  - Qwertious 4y ago
    Integrated video cards were integrated onto the motherboard. APUs/iGPUs are integrated into the CPU.
jjoonathan 4y ago
It's fair to extrapolate because their strategic decisions will be based on extrapolations. NVIDIA had to overclock and hustle the current generation of cards and it's looking even worse for the next generation. Software was a moat when AMD was heavily resource constrained, but now they can afford the headcount to give chase. Between the chip shortage and crypto, there was plenty of noise on top of fundamentals, but one doesn't make strategic plans based on noise. This is all speculative, of course. I'm sure if asked they would say it was a total coincidence. Just like AMD and Intel switching places on their stance towards overclocking. Complete coincidence that it matches the optimal strategy for their market position -- "milk it" vs "give chase." Somehow it always seems to match, though, and speculation is fun :)
- urthor 4y ago
  NVIDIA is well, well ahead of AMD. NVIDIA's cards were faster than AMD's with the huge gap in transistor density that was the Samsung fab. Don't get excited for the AMD graphics division up in Canada.
  - dralley 4y ago
    >NVIDIA's cards were faster than AMD's with the huge gap in transistor density that was the Samsung fab. They are roughly at par. AMD does better at lower resolutions because of their cache setup. With the refreshed cards, AMD is slightly ahead.
    - urthor 4y ago
      Keep in mind that is at a particular price point. NVIDIA's top of the range chip is ahead of AMD's, and the 3080's SKU is at a lower binning point on the bell curve than the 6950's. Hence NVIDIA would be able to maintain a performance per watt crown at the 6950's price point if it sold its highest bins cheaper. Given the gap in transistor density, that is an exorbitant architectural delta.
- TomVDB 4y ago
  I wish my company were in the same desperate situation as Nvidia. One where we’d be faster than the competition with similar perf/W while using a much inferior silicon process…

lawl 4y ago

Amd changed their windows drivers to not output video if it detects its running in a VM. Nvidia went the other way and stopped doing so. Both can/could be bypassed with some libvirtd xml magic, but still. Nvidia seem to slowly stop being assholes, AMD started already.

namlem 4y ago
The cycle continues
brezelgoring 4y ago
>Amd changed their windows drivers to not output video if it detects its running in a VM. What? Why?
- lawl 4y ago
  Presumably market segmentation. You're only allowed VMs that dont feel like shit (i.e. have gpu accel) if you pay for enterprise vGPU shit. Can't have someone buy two of your GPUs to give one to a VM, obviously.
  - kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
    > pay for enterprise vGPU For AMD the driver is difficult to find and poorly documented (and only available on ESXi unlike NVIDIA vGPU support for Xen, Hyper-V, KVM, Nutanix, and ESXi, etc.). At least the guest drivers don't have licensing issues unlike with NVIDIA IIUC.
    - my123 4y ago
      And very few AMD GPUs even support it... (and good luck finding a remotely recent AMD GIM driver)
      - snvzz 4y ago
        Plus the quality of the overall experience. And I understand NVIDIA is even worse re: GPU virtualization. The end result is that it is unusable in practice. Very difficult and restricted to few CPUs/GPUs and very specific software chain. Otherwise, it'd be open source, universally available and trivial to use. The good news is that I understand this support is actually good on the Intel side, and Intel has promised that they will actually release competitive GPUs soon. Should this truly be the case, it will automatically make Intel the go-to for GPU virtualization, and might help motivate NVIDIA/AMD to stop segmenting re: GPU virtualization, ending this shitty situation.

washadjeffmad 4y ago

Just had my first graphics stack issue since 2013 upgrading to Fedora 36 and was caught flat-footed. I've got multiple GPUs, so now I've got to figure out if it's Wayland, amdgpu, nouveau (since unblacklisting), or dkms. "Just working" has made me lazy.

rawoke083600 4y ago
Was in similar boat recently, I'm not that up to day with the whole X11 vs Wayland, but dammit am I mad ! I feel like JUST as the "Linux X11 Discrete Graphics Scenario" started to become more stable and less (not none, but less) of an issue to setup and upgrade without getting black screens, the Linux-world is now turning to a "new windowing server" i.e Wayland, we starting all over again sigh Maybe the answer to having a decent and carefree discrete graphics Linux stack is to fork (Don't you dare link to the XKCD comic about 'Standards') SteamOS. They are at least motivated (as it's part of their core product) to make it work most of the time. And have a done boat load of good work for Linux ecosystem. Well done guys ! :)