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AMD Releases 900+ Pages Of GPU Specs
An anonymous reader writes "Ending off the X Developer Summit this year, Matthew Tippett handed off ATI's GPU specifications to David Airlie on a CD. However, the specifications are also now available on the X.org site. Right now there is the RV630 Register Reference Guide and M56 Register Reference Guide. Expect more documentation (and 3D specifications) to arrive shortly. The new open-source R500/600 driver will be released early next week."
over NINE HUNDRED!!
The only way to get nVidia to release their specs is to show them that there is a real market.
I'll do my part and replace my AGP nVidia card with an ATI one as soon as there is a good review of an available card with this driver on Ubuntu.
no, wait, the other thing - tedious.
They've actually done it. It's time to buy an ATI card.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Closed-source drivers can be OK, except they tend to discontinue support after a while. Eventually the binary driver won't load into a current kernel and you are high and dry. With open-source drivers, the prospects for long-term support are better.
AMD ie recently making more moves toward the open source community than either it or ATI did prior to the merger.It seems to me that AMD has realized that there is value in not only having the right products rolling off the lines, but also having a greater mindshare.
Google realized this early, and bought off a great amount of geek awe by using Linux as the basis for its computing grid. This popularity among geeks turned into word of mouth advertising which turned into huge market share (having a great product didn't hurt either). Google still tries to maintain the "we're just a benign bunch of geeks" image (an image which is eroding, as it becomes more apparent that they are more akin to a lovechild of M$ and the NSA than a giant sushi eating LAN party). This appeal to mindshare by making steps toward the community, genuine or not, may be part of what AMD is trying to do, at least to an extent.
There are other genuine benefits to being more open about its specs, most clearly highlighted by the use of ATI GPUs to process Folding@Home. Therefore it is conceivable that AMD GPUs and GPU/CPU combo chips in the future may, if more openly specced, be used in a wider variety of HPC applications.
Disclaimer: I am an AMD fanboi.
I hate printers.
One can hope that it actually had the specifications for modern GPUs... and not just stuff you might find in scrap piles or in 15+ year old government computers. Otherwise, it will be like when the RIAA gave a crap-ton of Whitney Houston Christmas CDs as a settlement for their price-fixing practices... technically within the letter of the law, but violating the spirit of the law all to hell...
...will that GPU run Linux?
Just imagine an SLI'd Beowulf cluster of these!
np: Masha Qrella - Insecure (Luck)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
This is amazing news, not only that the specifications have finally been opened, but that the open source community has immediately utilized them to update the driver with a turn around time of only 2 weeks.
I guess we can thank Dell for pressuring ATI for better Linux support.
I wonder if this has more to do with trying to get mind and market share over intel than them really beleiving Open Source is the future of the market. maybe it's both.
Nice bit of good news anyway.
Actually this is the fun part. Governments have been "enforcing" open source as gimmicks. The only way to show there is a REAL market is to have an actual producer get involved and actually PROVIDE the goods and support. Red Hat did its part, various OSS groups did their part, etc.
:)
:) (Or build another one.)
They weren't tax supported, but they did a better job than all the tax supported wealth consuming agencies out there
I agree, once the cards hit my neck of the woods, if they're well implemented in hardware, I'll gladly supplant my 7800's in my SLI rig
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Come off it... that's not even enough for an Office document standard.
Worthless!
Bits 12 and 13 of D2CRTC_TRIGB_CNTL are D2CRTC_TRIGB_RISING_EDGE_DETECT_CNTL !!!
Hurray, now all Linux graphics problems are solved, it will autodetect all graphics cards like Windows 1.0 did and penguins will dance in the streets.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Actually there's a good number of modern AMD D3D10 products available on AGP now, and the older R5-series hardware had good AGP presence as well. Not the high-end R600 I should say, but RV630 and RV610 (HD 2600 and HD 2400) are both available. And the Windows Vista driver sucks, somewhat hilariously.
- 'sup, G?
They've released the specs, this doesn't mean anything yet. People forget just how complex graphics cards are. Writing a driver for something like a network card or SCSI controller is fairly easy, and that's also evident from how small the drivers are. There's just little to do. 3D cards are extremely complex, hence the massive amount of documentation. It isn't like there was just some magic number that needed releasing and the OSS drivers would be perfect with full support. There's now a ton of work to be done, since it sounds like it is just specs, not code, they are releasing.
So you'll probably want to wait and watch until the driver is ready to go and up to whatever performance and stability standards you need for your application. Switch now and you are likely to find yourself in essentially the same situation as before: ATi's binary driver, or an OSS driver that doesn't do what you want.
It'll be some time before this information can be transformed in to a fully functional, stable, fast driver. After all, if it were so easy, ATi and nVidia would have perfect drivers out on the launch of a new card and never need to do anything but minor updates.
An even better idea: since a Free driver can be included in the kernel source and compiled into a module, the installer doesn't have to do anything special to enable 3D acceleration. It just installs all available kernel modules as normal and the kernel figures it out at bootup time and loads the ATI driver if appropriate.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Specifically, google "over nine thousand" since the OP was paraphrasing. On a related note, my karma is over NINE THOUSAND!
For the record, Nvidia says otherwise.
You all should be grateful instead of pissing in their Cheerios."Thank you, oh benevolent masters, for supplying the software required to use the hardware that you gave me in exchange for money." Was that suitably deferential, or should I bend my knee more?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Heh - I think you're missing the implication of his statement.
Because Linux is less resource intensive, he's able to upgrade his distro several times on the same hardware, putting himself in the situation of having a new kernel with old hardware and old drivers that don't load in the new kernel.
If you want to upgrade Windows, you usually wind up needing a new machine, so: new machine, new video card, new drivers, new Windows -- not a problem. Well, at least not the same problem.
So it's not an issue of what's *wrong* with Linux, it's what's *right* with it. The problem is that this presents circumstances the hardware world isn't used to dealing with.
Where's the -1 delusional mod?
ATI have historically always had excellent features on their cards for supporting media playback. The downside was that accessing them in Linux has always been much harder than using the equivalent features on nvidia hardware.
If these specs allow a good stable XVMC driver to be written for ATI hardware, ATI could become the top choice for Linux media centre boxes.
NVidia have been stalwart protectors of their hardware designs, mostly due to historical accident. A few of the principals at NVidia used to work at Sun, where they designed the GX graphics chip. As it turns out, a version of SunOS was released with a header file describing the chip's registers. Using that -- and a logic analyzer -- a company called Weitek successfully created a functional clone of the chip that was good enough such that Sun's own drivers worked on it. This stuck in the craw of the Sun guys, and evidently vowed no such thing would happen again.
Another historical accident was that NVidia did, in fact, have a few source code releases way back. And every time they did, so it seemed, they got hit a few weeks later with a patent infringement lawsuit, usually from SGI. NVidia solved this latter problem largely through the expedient of buying SGI.
So, no, I don't think they're going to do it, and certainly not within six months. And yes, I would be perfectly tickled to be wrong about that.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Specs for r500(the X1k series) are supposedly in the pipleline. For matching codenames->marketing names, I recommend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ATI_Graphics_Processing_Units And the reason why they are so "deficient" is they have a team of a few engineers helping the X.org folks write the drivers. They have also said that they will be providing code snippets in the future to help clear up unclear parts of the spec. This is just a teaser release, not all we're getting.
thisnukes4u.net
And the Windows Vista driver sucks, somewhat hilariously.
It wasn't too long ago that I was at Microsoft's Philadelphia offices for an Exchange 2007 presentation. The first thing that they wanted to show was a short video on a projection screen -- what they actually showed the audience was a Vista laptop with ATI graphics choking half way through a two-minute video and then puking an error message saying that the video driver crashed and was being restarted. And some guy behind me said "Twelve years later and they still can't get the presentation right."
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Well, if I can't get specs, my next video card will be an nVidia. Why should I suffer because my HW vendor wants to hide something from me? Do they really believe that non-functional hardware gains them any marketshare?
Now how does this make a lick of sense? nVidia haven't released ANY specs.
Also, I'd imagine that 2d rendering is reasonably similar across chipsets, but I admit I'm just guessing there.
The issue with a closed driver for the nVidia cards that actually performs somewhat well is actually a detriment for the community at large. It causes some people who would be interested in making a better open driver to just suck it up and use the existing closed driver because it's easier even though it has many problems.
I am very thankful that AMD has released specs. Until nVidia follows suit there should be no real reason to buy nVidia cards. This means that they will be forced to eventually release specs and those of us who had no support from nVidia will finally get a working driver.
As an nVidia customer, all I can say is Thank You AMD!
"Expect more documentation (and 3D specifications) to arrive shortly."
In short, we have 2D documentation but no 3D documentation. It's been this way for years, nothing is different.
The last time someone (Matrox) said "3D specifications to arrive shortly", a whole bunch of suckers (including myself) bought cards and got shafted because the promised specifications were never released. My G200 was replaced by a Riva TNT2 within six months and I haven't left NVidia since then.
Others promise open specifications and fail to release them fully, resulting in cards that are paperweights.
NVidia doesn't promise open specifications, but at least they deliver solid drivers that work (and work well).
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?