[AnthonyMouse]

> But Linux repesents a tiny portion of the gaming community, so that approach would make no sense at all for a GPU vendor. C'mon.

The growth market for GPUs is GPGPU and servers. And Linux represents a large portion of the programming and server communities.

More to the point, as soon as you support Linux at all then it doesn't matter who has more share, it's still less work to do the above than have to maintain another translation layer.

[freeone3000]

But AMD doesn't. GPGPU is already supported on nvidia drivers with their opaque blob. AMD has a more-transparent blob. People who want this to work already have a solution. This kernel change is probably important to some people, but those who simply want to run a GPGPU cluster on linux already have workable solutions.

[AnthonyMouse]

The GPGPU market is the polar opposite of the gaming market.

Game developers might like to see clean driver source but they don't get to choose what kind of GPU their customers have already bought. And 99% of gamers are not going to choose their GPU based on Linux drivers. So nobody has any leverage and vendors have no incentive to change.

Meanwhile thousands of universities and institutions are each going to be looking for 25,000 GPUs and they can choose what brand they buy based on what makes their internal developers happy. Hosts like Amazon and Google are each going to be buying millions of GPUs, and having better and more transparent drivers so they can more easily e.g. improve power consumption by a small percentage, can save them a million dollars/year in electricity.

Someone like Google could come to each vendor and say "first to have mainline kernel drivers gets all our business" at any point. Or the same result in the other order; once there are clean drivers third parties are more likely to make power consumption and performance improvements that give AMD the edge when the major customers crunch the numbers.

There is a significant competitive advantage in it for AMD to get this right.

[toxik]

Very good point, there's definitely a growing market for high-bandwidth GPGPU solutions, neural networks is probably just the start.