The Nvidia Linux Advantage

Bjorn3D recently posted a commentary by Bryan Duncan on The Nvidia Linux Advantage. The article highlights the significance of Linux support in NVIDIA’s mulit-platform UDA (Unified Driver Architecture). Here’s a snippet:

AMD’s 64-bit CPU is backwards compatible with 32-bit operating systems, but it doesn’t make sense to saddle it with a 32-bit OS when there’s 64-bit UNIX OS’s ready and waiting to exploit that new CPU! The UNIX open source development community has been working closely with AMD to ensure 64-bit applications are available and optimized for the Athlon 64. It may be just a little optimistic to expect to jump into computing nirvana as soon as one can get an Athlon 64, but the experience NVIDIA and the open source development community will get working with 64-bit processing is invaluable. You do want them to work out all the bugs before your Windows PC goes 64-bit, right? NVIDIA made it quite clear during their conference call for this release that they believe UNIX, especially in the form of Linux, has reached critical mass and requires their dedicated attention. It’s not enough, they believe, to treat Windows as 99.9% of the market. We agree. Many PC users are running multiple OS’s on one machine. Those with NVIDIA graphics cards should see performance results on their Linux/FreeBSD partition on par with that of their Windows partitions. If you’re using Linux or FreeBSD and own an NVIDIA GPU, or are considering buying one, then this is extremely welcome news. Other manufacturers and suppliers are sure to follow NVIDIA’s lead and that’s good news for non-Windows users.