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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neil Booth who wrote (48936)	7/25/2001 10:18:30 AM
From: fyodor_	Respond to of 275872

Neil: Unforunately, it's not free software, and the drivers often crash the Linux kernel. Not for me. That's one thing I never understood. Why keep the driver source code proprietary? If a competing company wants to waste time and money analyzing and reverse engineering your drivers while you develop your next generation, so what? Besides, all the really interesting things in the driver can be fairly easily extracted by the competition anyway, so why bother? -fyo

To: Neil Booth who wrote (48936)	7/25/2001 11:33:46 AM
From: jamok99	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Neil, <<(fyodor):Companies like NVIDIA are so much better off (or, rather, their customers are) since they used fully unified device drivers (Neil:)Yeah, they use the same code for their Linux drivers, too. Unforunately, it's not free software, and the drivers often crash the Linux kernel. Not for me>> I don't use Linux so in that area I have no familiarity, but Nvidia's drivers for their video cards is not only unified and free, but also frequently updated, often with noticeable gains in framerate. Indeed, I recall their being commended for the sophistication and maturity of their drivers (especially as compared to competitors, with one article (I think on Adreanalinevault.com) being amazed by and praising how much of an increase Nvidia was able to squeeze out just by optimizing their video drivers, in one of their revisions.) My point is this: There has been a fair amount of skepticism about the hurdles Nvidia faces in producing a mobo chipset for AMD products, and whether they could get it anywhere near right the first time. While I don't doubt that the task is daunting, and perhaps not achieveable, I tend to think that if anyone could come close to pulling it off, Nvidia probably could, as they seem to have one quality that AMD often aadly lacks - pretty consistently excellent execution on their products in terms of performance, freedom from glitches, and (well, mostly, at least compared to competitors) timeliness. The fact that they are poised to dominate in a sector that is even more cutthroat and with faster product cycles than cpus says a lot about the company. They may not be the 'savior' of AMD's infrastructure that some tout them as, but I wouldn't count them out before we see the product, or bet against them. Jamok