AMD's Open Source Video Drivers

AMD will be establishing a viable open source
Linux driver for their X1K and HD2K series video cards, and will be continuing to provide their binary drivers simultaneously. AMD will not be providing any of their current driver code for use in the open source driver - this would break licensing agreements and reveal trade secrets - rather they want their open source driver built from the ground-up. Furthermore they will not be directly working on the driver themselves (we assume all of their on-staff programmers are
"contaminated" from a legal point of view) and instead will be having the open source community build the drivers, with Novell's SuSE Linux division leading the effort.

AMD Unveils Barcelona Quad-Core Details

AMD Unveils Barcelona Quad-Core Details:

"Processor architecture designs take years from initial conception to the first shipping CPU sliding out of the fab assembly. So it's clear that AMD's new CPU architecture has been in the works for some time. Whether that's a problem or not vis à vis the competition isn't yet known, since AMD isn't yet talking about performance details.

What is known is that Barcelona—as AMD has dubbed this first iteration—isn't so much a brand-new architecture as it is a highly refined, tweaked version of the existing AMD x86-64. Those tweaks are numerous and significant. It's probably fair to suggest that Barcelona is to the current Opterons as Intel's Core 2 is to the Pentium M—designed from the ground up, on a base of the old with a lot of new stuff rolled in.

The details of Barcelona discussed in this article were presented by Ben Sander, who led the performance modeling group for Barcelona. Sander's team cranked real-world application traces through iterations of the new processor—both simulated and real. Although he's uniquely positioned to discuss performance, Sander didn't really comment on performance yet. What he discussed instead were some of the enhancements built into Barcelona.

With these thoughts in mind, let's take a look at some of the shiny new features."