Patrick Mullen
writes:
In two months time, we’ve certainly seen some
interesting developments. Nothing earth-shattering like the entire
world switching to Linux, but it’s an interesting scenario with
WindowsXP on its way to consumers. In this short time, we’ve seen
some rays of hope as well as caverns of despair.In the world of graphics, a lot is going on. NVIDIA has
unleashed their new Ti series of cards, which includes a GeForce2
Ti, GeForce3 Ti 200 and GeForce3 Ti 500. NVIDIA is up to their
usual tricks with their naming schemes, but at least it’s now
semi-obvious as to which card offers the highest performance. As
you may guess, NVIDIA is on the ball with Linux drivers and already
has these cards supported. ATI’s Radeon 8500 is edging out the
GeForce3 Ti 500 in many benchmarks, but one can only wonder when
Linux drivers will come for ATI’s newest incarnation of the Radeon.
As usual, take their benchmarks with a heaping bowl of salt, as
drivers can make a huge difference in performance.In Kyro I/II news, ST Micro now has someone working on its
drivers for Linux . There isn’t an exact date set for the release,
but at least there’s signs of life on ST Micro’s end. At first it
looked like ST Micro was abandoning any chance of an open-source
driver, but they are now considering it. Being a user of more than
just Linux, it would be great to see an open-source driver, but a
driver of any kind will be of great use to me and many other users,
I’m sure.In further graphics news, it looks like there’s hope for Linux
users and 3Dlabs’ Wildcat series of graphics cards. It was reported
a little over two months ago that there would be no Linux drivers,
but XiG contacted me shortly thereafter and assured me Linux
drivers were on the way. These will come at a cost, obviously, but
aren’t high-end graphics users ready to spend a bit more on their
workstations?Since there’s more than just graphics cards these days (although
sometimes it seems otherwise), it’s probably also worth noting that
3Ware has stopped production of their Escalade 6000 series and will
be producing a whole lot less of their 7000 series. 3Ware is
claiming their cards were a huge success, but I find that hard to
believe — when was the last time a company recalled a
highly-successful product? This is a sad day for IDE RAID users on
Linux, since 3Ware was one of the few manufacturers that had
drivers in the Linux kernel for their IDE RAID cards. 3Ware’s
Escalade will, nevertheless, be missed.AMD is seeing falling profits but is trudging ahead with its
line of processors. They’ve switched to a Rating system to keep up
with Intel, who is also moving ahead with their slightly
clock-bloated Pentium 4. This brings visions of Cyrix’s PR system
to mind, but one can only hope that AMD won’t go the same way Cyrix
did.