[Bf-funboard] Physical Memory and Cycles

[Patrick Shirkey]

On Fri, May 10, 2013 11:05 pm, Brecht Van Lommel wrote:
> I don't want to get in a discussion here, but I'll just say that from
> working on Cycles OpenCL support and talking to AMD developers I did
> not get this impression at all. Note we are talking here about the
> closed source AMD implementation of OpenCL which is used by both open
> source and closed source projects.
>

It's good to know that you have experienced some positive behaviour from
your dealings with the AMD developers.

Our experience of dealing with other (possibly higher ranking) AMD
representatives has been significantly different.

We definitely got the impression that some parts of AMD are not aware of
the decisions being made in other parts of the company and if they are
aware, they are purposefully making things difficult for open source
and/or are actively working against their own employers internal policies
resulting in the mess that AMD is now in, having lost the majority of
their stock value in the past couple of years and being propped up by
Mubadala to stop them from having to declare bankruptcy in Q1 of this
year.



> Brecht.
>
> On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 12:23 PM, Patrick Shirkey
> <pshirkey at boosthardware.com> wrote:
>> - 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.
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--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd