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ATI readies big Linux driver push |
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Written by Phyro
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Saturday, 25 September 2004 |
And claims 22% Doom III boost with ATI Catalyst. Terry Makedon, a senior product manager, largely talked about those, but he did say the firm is readying a major push in the next few weeks to outline its plans for Linux driver support. He said that ATI has three main goals for Linux. He said that ATI supports Linux which represents around four per cent of the market, and that the firm's Linux efforts are proportional to the market.
 ATI readies big Linux driver push
He said that ATI had rebuilt its Linux driver team with a lot of new developers. He said ATI will improve its test process including automated test methodologies, lots of new ways of testing more efficiently. He said ATI's priority was to make PCIe Linux drivers ready as well as provide support for AMD64.
An announcement by SuSE Novell expected in a few weeks may provide more details to this jigsaw puzzle, we anticipate.
Makedon outlined ATI's stance on PCI Express and has shipped over a million processors to date in the X600, X600 and X300 families. Intel and ATI are working pretty closely on this PCI Express stuff, although our view is that it is going to take a little while before PCIe comes into its own.
The big challenge with PCIe cards is to keep them cool, said Makedon, so ATI's designs use a variable fan. The X700, introduced last week, is now ATI's mainstream product which he claimed provides HDTV video quality.
Future versions of Catalyst Control Center will provide automatic updates in the future, will have better colour and vdeo management, and product support across the range of ATI chips. In early October, ATI will release Catalyst AI which will analyse apps and games to maximize the performance of graphics, said Makedon. It will only be used to optimize games and applications, and never for benchmarks, Makedon vowed. He also suggested that AI Catalyst when used to optimize Doom III, will yield a 22 per cent performance boost.
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