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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

#221

Post by espadrine »

sangnoir wrote: post #184
StRoy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without any conflict, uh? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ > Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with. > - Linus Kernel devs are antagonizing the only two GPU makers that matters. Besides the kernel, there has been some flame going between NVIDIA and Wayland devs too. Open source devs are immature men who do not understand the word compromise.

> Without any conflict, uh? > Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with. > - Linus This had nothing to do with the kernel and everything to do with the lack of optimus support (years later, its still shit). > Kernel devs are antagonizing the only two GPU makers that matters Maybe the 2 should ask Intel for some pointers on how to contribute to the kernel the right way. > Open source devs are imma…

> Maybe the 2 should ask Intel for some pointers on how to contribute to the kernel the right way.

Intel is not waiting for them to ask:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2016-Decemb...

> This is something you need to fix, or it'll stay completely painful forever. It's hard work and takes years, but here at Intel we pulled it off. We can upstream everything from a _very_ early stage (can't tell you how early). And we have full marketing approval for that. If you watch the i915 commit stream you can see how our code is chasing updates from the hw engineers debugging things.

(More specific advice follows.)

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

#222

Post by mangeletti »

dzhang50 wrote: post #76
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,…

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.

Maybe this is why their net is negative; because they don't allocate money to the right things.

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

#223

Post by brainfire »

chris_wot wrote: post #220
Certhas wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this have to do with Windows vs Linux? It's about closely working with hardware engineers.

"I think the argument here is that stability is gained from having code shared as closely as possible with the Windows codebase". HTH.

You have to read the rest of the comment too. "HTH"

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

#224

Post by pjz »

MayeulC wrote: post #207
rwmj wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even better, give us an open source out-of-tree driver, and wait. Someone in the community will do the cleanup and get it upstream eventually. For free .

While that's probably true, it won't happen overnight, and I understand their position of wanting it merged before rolling out new hardware, or more generally, as soon as possible.

...fast, correct, cheap: pick two.

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

#225

Post by phkahler »

trome wrote: post #147
phkahler wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It is hard to get resources to do things right sometimes, even in big companies. There are a lot of competing priorities. AMD has the resources. The problem seems to be getting them allocated to this particular issue. I also find your phrasing interesting. Doing it "right" is always my top priority and every compromise from that is considered and balanced. In my experience, not doing it right is almost always more…

AMD could likely allocate the resources, but what will they cut to do so? At this point they are a token competitor to Intel and are losing money and have been losing money for years, so how much of their financial runway are they willing to burn up on a platform that doesn't use them for servers and minimally uses them for gaming (where the platform has no marketshare). I as a full time debian user for the past few…

OMG I didn't know they were making customers pay in advance. That's really bad. I do understand their position on the issue, but I also get the kernel guys point. I have some faith that a compromise will be found because it's in the best interest of AMD and Linux.

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

#226

Post by samfisher83 »

lvs wrote: post #168
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.

It does, in fact, report around the gross profit I specified. Why don't you look at the financials [1]. I think many people in this thread, including you, don't know what the term "gross profit" means. [1] http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-fundIncomeA

Gross profits don't include things like R&D and Sales just the Revenue - cost of goods sold. They have a negative net profit margin. They are hemorrhaging cash, and have a lot of debt. The have negative share holder equity. They are in a bad financial position. Therefore it is kind of commendable they have some one trying to improve their linux drivers. They can't just "Afford" to just throw more people at the problem because of their financial issues.

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

#227

Post by __s »

mcpherrinm wrote: post #164
chris_wot wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is, had they followed some of the subclassing practices already in the kernel, it sounds like they could have had cleaner, more easily testable code with what from what I can tell tends to giv them a pretty unified interface. The belie, however, is an appalling response really: I realize you care about code quality and style, but do you care about stable functionality? Would you really merge a bunch o…

I think the argument here is that stability is gained from having code shared as closely as possible with the Windows codebase, which is where most of the QA work happens, and what the real experts debugging their ASICs use. From a hardware and driver development standpoint, I think that makes a decent amount of sense. Hardware is often weird and quirky, so making sure you handle all the edge cases in two different c…

Flipside being that if AMD drivers are developed in the open with proper convention then kernel developers will help maintain them, alleviating cost for AMD. If AMD doesn't want the public maintaining their open source driver then they don't want their driver in the kernel

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

#229

Post by Lazare »

wfunction wrote: post #125
bertjk wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have raised cash by taking on investment from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (the sovereign wealth fund) and also selling off some major assets, most notably their fabs (GlobalFoundries) and even their HQ building. It is also worth noting that large accounting losses do not always correspond to large negative cash flows. Stuff like depreciation (though less of an issue now without the fabs) and writing off "…

Huh, not sure I understand all of it but good information nonetheless; thanks!

Let's say you sell $9 billion of shares, and build a massive fab with it. You believe it'll have a working life of about 15 years, before changing technology makes it worthless.

Each year you spend $100 million on salaries, rent, and materials, and you earn $500 million in sales, leaving you with $400 million in the bank at the end of year 1, $800 million after year 2, $1.6 billion after year 4, etc.

Pretty good, right? Not really.

You're cash flow positive to the tune of $400 million/year, but you're not profitable. You spent $9 billion on that fab; since it'll last for 15 years that means each year costs about $600 million. Or to put it another way, at the end of 15 years you'll have $6 billion in the bank, but you started with $9 billion. Turning $9 billion into $6 billion is the opposite of a profit. And since it's not enough to build a new fab, it's also the opposite of "having a functional business".

Another example might be selling off a profitable business for an injection of cash. The cash helps you pay salaries and keep the lights on, but if that's all you do with it you're now even less profitable than when you started. Or as in AMDs case, you could sell off your headquarters, then lease it back. You get a pile of cash initially, but you then have to pay it all back and more just to keep using your headquarters, and the increased costs will lower profits.

Similarly, if you can convince people to keep investing, you can run keep running a loss but not run out of cash.

(All numbers utterly hypothetical. I'm also simplifying a lot.)

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

#230

Post by rasz_pl »

AlisdairO wrote: post #86
kstrauser wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: we have the resources. We just don't want to allocate them and would prefer that you did the work instead.

I would think that any company that's lost as much money for as long as AMD has has a right to say that they don't have the necessary resources.

The mere fact they are losing all this money means they DO have the resources, they just routinely waste them on stupid shit (seamicro/raptr etc).
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