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Comment by fbreduc | Hacker News Reader

> They don't have the resources to do it right.

Honestly I hear this quite often from big companies and it always is the biggest load of BS ever..

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).

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

Perhaps it's just internal politics: the company did in fact allocated the resources, the people put in charge failed to do their job, and once their screwup goes public they opt to shift the blame elsewhere.

It is hard to get resources to do things right sometimes, even in big companies. There are a lot of competing priorities.

If only there was some way to use leverage to require them to assign resources to a project.

>> 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 costly but sometime necessary to appease someone. It's interesting that Dave is standing his ground against a multi-billion dollar company for their own long-term good - or at least what he perceives it to be.

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 years get it. AMD's Linux devs heavily dislike direct rendering manager and want to provide all the cool crap their proprietary driver does to Mesa, cause DRM is legacy tech and they have over 1000 SKUs of cards to support, 2 competitors breathing down their neck on both the GPU, CPU and SOC sides, and they wanna get this shipped.

I hope I've illuminated the state of the situation for you, I do think the right decision was made to not merge this code, but be realistic about AMD's position, they are so far in the hle financially that customers are having chips made to order after paying, meaning its at least 3 months from the time f order until you get your chip. They spend nearly all that time making the silicon, then packaging it so it can go onto your motherboard.

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.

Yeah, the outlook for AMD is poor, but their new ARM chips at least look appealing, with 2x 10GBe on the SOC at well below market price.

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