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Last year, AMD introduced Ryzen Pro, a range of processors aimed at corporate desktops rather than consumer systems. Though broadly identical to their consumer counterparts, the Pro chips offer additional guarantees around supply and availability so that corporate fleets can standardize on particular chips without risking a part being discontinued mid-way through their replacement cycle. The Pro chips also carry longer warranties and emphasize certain security and management features that may not be present or enabled in consumer systems.
The first Ryzen Pros had a major omission, however: they didn't include integrated GPUs. Corporate desktops and laptops, typically used for Office, Web browsing, and other low-intensity tasks, overwhelmingly use integrated GPUs rather than discrete ones; they simply don't need anything more powerful. The need for separate GPUs meant that the first-generation Ryzen Pros had only very limited appeal in their target corporate market.
The new processors, however, follow in the footsteps of the Ryzens with integrated Vega graphics launched in February, pairing a single core complex (CCX; a bundle of four cores/eight threads and a shared level 3 cache) with a Vega GPU. This makes them a complete solution for the corporate desktop.
Source: GPU-equipped Ryzen Pros give AMD what it needs to conquer the corporate desktop
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @03:29AM
Not sure what you are on about. Nvidia never supported development of free drivers for their hardware. And, when nouveau finally became usable, Nvidia doubled down on hostility to free drivers and basically broke nouveau being able to ship the required binary blob firmware for newer cards.
AMD free drivers require a proprietary blob firmware*, which is unfortunate, but the free drivers are quite stable and have good performance. They are usable for most tasks, except all but the most trivial opencl. AMD also provided assistance in creating the free driver, unlike Nvidia.
* The author of Lima driver has a long rant on how redhat lobbied for the commercially expedient binary blob firmware drivers, and attacked the devs working on the AMD free drivers which, at the time, took the ideologically pure approach of writing directly to hardware registers. His treatment (including personal attacks) by Redhat while working on the AMD free driver (he was not a RH employee), was one of the reasons cited for him also quitting development of Lima. So, RH is also has blame for the setback of several years to the free driver for ARM's Mali GPU.