[svlug] HTPC: Asus P5E-VM HDMI G35, GeForce 8200 mGPU or other?

[Alan DuBoff]

On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, Marc MERLIN wrote:

> Don't sell yourself short, you never know :)

I was just trying to be a realist! *lol*

> That's the part I wasn't sure about. AMD had Cool and quiet 
> CPUs (like my current Septron one) when Intel didn't. Looks 
> like things are reversed now.

Yes, this is true and if we were to step back in time, AMD 
offered more bang for the buck about 4 years ago. SledgeHammer 
was brilliant, and was able to draw on history with backwards 
compatibility. They really did come up with a better 64 bit chip 
before Intel, and Intel was still chasing Itanic at the time. 
Finally that is being put to sleep it would appear. One other 
point is that AMD used to trash Intel every chance they got on 
the fact that Intel used two separate cores on one die, but 
AMD's new chipsets do the same thing.:-/ That doesn't seem very 
honorable...

With Nahalem and Penryn (C6 sleep state), Intel is moving ahead, 
and now that they secured the Mac space (who would have 
thought????;-) Intel is the dominant player. The fact they do 
support open source is a huge plus, and it appears that Intel 
has more people working on open source, but I don't know if that 
is true. I do know that most folks I knew at AMD were laid off 
or left on their own accord.

> Yes, that's entirely correct. AMD means well, but they have a 
> lot of catching up to do.

Yes, I agree but have to wonder how they can do that in open 
source without having the resources, or a good track record of 
working with open source. ATI doesn't help them in that space. 
ATI is one company I advocate people stay away from at all 
expense in open source, they have never been a friend of open 
source in any way, what so ever...

> Well, you can't just compare that without CPU generations, 
> speeds, and all, but point taken.

Yeah, it was a generalization, but I have installed a lot of 
systems with various OSs in the past 5 years, and in general the 
recent Intel systems are way more bang for the buck. AMD is not 
bad, I own several systems with their chips which I spent my own 
$$$s with, but I wouldn't do that today.

> Yes. I'm good friends with Keith Packard ;)

Yes, exactly one of the people I was thinking about. They also 
hired Dirk Hohndel, but he was working on system tools or 
something other than X I heard from an Intel contact. It is also 
my understanding that Intel has also hired a couple other folks 
out of the X community, which is good.

> That's my current plan with the Asus P5E-VM HDMI G35, it just looked like
> some of the hardware support it comes with is just becoming usable now.

I saw it had a Core2 in it, but wasn't sure about all the 
details of that mobo. The GeForce looks good on paper, but if 
they don't offer good support for Linux, it's little use for 
you.

I would trust Intel to pony up some resources to get drivers 
and/or specs to the community, they already have a pretty good 
track record of that and continue to make that better.

All in all, I see Intel as being an honorable open source 
company, with intentions to continue that way. It's not that 
AMD/ATI is not an honorable company, but I think it gets down 
to, "what have you done for me lately?", and I come up empty 
scratching my head on that one...:-/

--

Alan DuBoff - Software Orchestration