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AMD responds to Linux kernel maintainer's rejection of AMDGPU patch

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Re: AMD responds to Linux kernel maintainer's rejection of AMDGPU patch

#101

Post by Lazare »

wfunction wrote: post #99
drite wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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.

Re: AMD responds to Linux kernel maintainer's rejection of AMDGPU patch

#102

Post by tw04 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #96
dzhang50 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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._...

Re: AMD responds to Linux kernel maintainer's rejection of AMDGPU patch

#104

Post by benjamin_mahler »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #91
indolering wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus made the right engineering choice when he took the monolithic route in the 90's. However, the technical advantages of that architecture are now moot. Sooner-or-later, Google is going to get tired of Linux's shortcomings and build a replacement OS.

They seem to have started: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia

They also have some folks working on Akaros. http://akaros.cs.berkeley.edu

Re: AMD responds to Linux kernel maintainer's rejection of AMDGPU patch

#105

Post by nradov »

wfunction wrote: post #99
drite wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

You can see a table of AMD quarterly net income back to 2004 here.

https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/net_income_ttm

Re: AMD responds to Linux kernel maintainer's rejection of AMDGPU patch

#107

Post by wfunction »

Lazare wrote: post #101
wfunction wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 le…

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?

Re: AMD responds to Linux kernel maintainer's rejection of AMDGPU patch

#108

Post by threeseed »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #69
Spivak wrote: post #23

I really don't understand why AMD cares so much about getting their driver upstreamed. If their code doesn't meet the kernel standards and they don't want to fix it then just package it up as kernel module and ship it like Nvidia does. Distributions will package it using DKMS and other than some occasional troubleshooting they wont even notice. It's really no difference than Windows in that respect. His arguments see…

They don't have the resources to do it right. I loved that line from his post, in particular. "We have the resources to design a billion-transistor GPU, but not to write a Linux driver for it." Poor management on AMD's part does not constitute an emergency on the Linux kernel's part.

How is that poor management ?

Linux gaming is a blip when you compare it to (a) the total gaming market, (b) the professional creative market and (c) the big data/deep learning market. All of which AMD is selling graphics cards into. And it's not like Linux is even some massive growth market that justifies some risky investment.

Re: AMD responds to Linux kernel maintainer's rejection of AMDGPU patch

#109

Post by appleiigs »

AlisdairO wrote: post #82
lvs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 good job on upstream-able code is just farcical. That's a question of corporate priorities, not resources, and gets precisely to the critique of corporate culture that was in question. > There's only so much time in the day; we'd like to make our code perfect,…

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.

"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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