[Bf-funboard] Physical Memory and Cycles

[Patrick Shirkey]

On Fri, May 10, 2013 7:47 pm, Brecht Van Lommel wrote:
> Let me say that I don't think this is true at all. There's no reason
> to think that AMD is purposefully crippling their OpenCL drivers.
>

There are plenty of reasons.

- They refuse to actively support open source projects.
- They release incomplete documentation when they do "throw us a bone"
even going so far as to suggest we reverse engineer the information we
need from proprietary projects which have full access to their internal
documentation.
- In the case of Blender and FFMPEG they fund competing proprietary
projects run by their mates.
- They spend a large amount of money on closed source solutions that use
their proprietary API's. To get access to the proprietary docs requires
spending large sums of money on an ongoing basis.
- They actively work to cripple their existing drivers.
- They don't provide details for open source implmentations of their drivers.
- They retire driver support and stop selling hardware just about as soon
as they have made them work effectively for Open Source users.
- They are no longer producing motherboards that can be used with Linux.
All their latest boards require UEFI.
- They refuse to provide test devices to the people who can build the open
source software/drivers that can run on their hardware while at the same
time providing them to their proprietary projects run by their mates.

If that is not enough "evidence" for you they are actively courting,
wooing and taking kickbacks from their mates at Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft
so they can have their hardware in the next generation of gaming consoles.

AMD as a company or at least certain people at AMD are doing everything
they can to hobble or cripple the progress of opensource.


> Most likely it's just that NVidia cards have more CPU like features,
> or that their compiler design is more geared toward such things as
> they had Gelato and iRay to learn from.
>
> Brecht.
>
> On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 6:39 AM, Patrick Shirkey
> <pshirkey at boosthardware.com> wrote:
>> The issue is that AMD have purposefully crippled the OpenCL drivers by
>> inlining all the compiled kernel code which requires excessive amounts
>> of
>> physical memory and takes a very long time to compile.
>>
>> They say they are working on a fix but they truth is they have known
>> exactly what they were doing from the start. They simply don't want
>> openCL
>> to be complete as it would make a big impact for other open source
>> projects which do not pay them kickbacks (M$) and compete with the
>> proprietary projects their mates are being sponsored to build with AMD's
>> ever dwindling cash supply.
>>
>> It's a game that has been played for a while. In this case the Blender
>> devs have caught them with their hand in the coookie jar so now they
>> have
>> egg on their face and might be forced to do something about it.
>>
>> Don't expect it to happen quickly though as AMD are completely beholden
>> to
>> M$, APPLE, and the US Military (via the Carlyle Group who are major
>> shareholders in Mubadala which is the parent company of AMD).
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--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd