Stealth drivers and AMD’s Achilles’ heel
A simple little incident, on the surface at least. We put together a couple of PCs because we wanted to test the customer’s working from home capacity. The VDI host machine was a beast: an HP Z820 workstation, with some heavy wow-factor liquid CPU cooling – the second time I’ve seen what we think of as a gamer mod present in a stiff and upright corporate hardcore workstation. It didn’t leak or gurgle, and it kept the machine amazingly quiet. The user workstation was my old Opteron eight-core machine, manufacturer unknown because a) I found it in a skip and b) I don’t speak Korean.
It was nearly one of those project days where I start breaking things out of sheer frustration. The two machines could hardly be more different, yet they both suffered from the same problem! Both didn’t have easily applicable, readily downloadable hardware support drivers. The HP workstation wouldn’t even show us add-on 10GbE Ethernet cards in the device manager, and the Opteron machine crawled through file moves and copies as if it was still in the skip.
The solution wasn’t obvious and came to me as part of my “just do random things” approach when faced with these frustrations. In the case of the Opteron, it was a file named “amd-chipset-drivers_18.10_0830. exe”, found on a motherboard manufacturer’s download pages, not centrally at AMD. On installation this little charmer threw up a dialog saying: “Oh yeah, I’m for the 8000 Series chipsets but I probably work on the 7000, 6000, 5000 and a few others.”
You can guess the punchline. After a whizz through some file-copy dialogs moving too fast to read, the machine rebooted, coming back at least twice as nippy as it had been in the last couple of years of regular use.
The HP Z series was in the same boat. The reason it couldn’t see the Ethernet card was that it didn’t really see any of the expansion slots, at least not until I worked out which Intel motherboard chipset it was and found a matching installer at intel.com. The neat trick with these is that, quite often, the chipset installer doesn’t actually contain anything active at all; it’s just . INF files that let the rest of the OS know where the chips are in the memory map. This means that, as with the AMD mystery machine booster, you don’t have to be 100% correct on the match between your driver download and your OS version. I’ve loaded up Vista drivers to Windows 10 on this principle before.
I wish I could feel good about all these misadventures, but I can’t find the breadcrumb trail leading back to the vendor support site where I found that revolutionary AMD download. I don’t believe it was in the disorganised, gamer-grade download pool at AMD itself. Why am I exercised by this? Because AMD has a massive stranglehold on the PC marketplace right now. After decades as the second choice to Intel, it has leapfrogged the ageing giant and is now being taken up by a massive variety of buyers, in companies big and small.
Just about the only thing that could arrest a stampede like this is poor machine support. AMD’s history as a vendor has had some pretty lean times in it, and that meant support being done by the actual box manufacturer, with the files being presented on the box man’s web servers. There was no overarching concept of either “universal drivers” where one download serves a whole range of machines, nor of a central authoritative repository, which is how Intel viewed its responsibilities. At least until the 2010s.
I’m sure that the shiny new Ryzens hitting the shop this season are configured correctly, and it’s in the nature of our business that the really modern machines are much more self-maintaining than the servers and laptops of yesteryear, but I’ve found enough machines with misconfigured RAID, slow, cheap primary storage, and simply unticked options, that convince me there’s a need for the market leader to take on a civic duty. It needs to show a nice, clean minimalist support environment, with free and clearly described downloads for all. The question is, how soon will AMD wake up to its responsibilities?