ATI Releasing Specs for TV Tuner

Jonathan C. Masters writes "As you may be aware, a long battle with ATI has been going on to persaude them to release developer information about their TV Tuner products to the Linux community. Well, it's happened! Sorry folkes, there is no Web page yet (I was notified by a mail list). Checkout this page for general info (CT:Seems to be down) and this one for more ." Someday we'll live in a world where specs aren't propriatary.

Comments

Why they withhold specs

[Christopher Thomas]

I don't really understand the mentality of hardware manufacturers who seem to think that publishing details on how to program their hardware directly somehow threatens their market share. After all, a "black-box" developers' guide doesn't really give anyone that much of an insight into how the hardware actually _works_, so I honestly can't see how their competitors can use it against them (the latest bogus argument I've heard for withholding specs).

Actually, you can get a fair bit of insight into a graphics chip's inner workings by looking at the register specifications, and if I understand correctly this is indeed what they're worried about. I speak as a graphics driver writer :). However, this isn't as much of a problem as most graphics chip companies seem to think, because by the time their competition can apply anything that they figure out from your specs, you've released the chip and are well on your way to finishing the design for your next chip.

The main disadvantage to releasing your specs that I can see is that your competition gets to see exactly how ugly some of your chip architecture is. I can't mention names due to NDA, but at least one of the chips we have to program for makes me want to crawl under my desk and whimper - and I'm an excellent programmer with a very good grasp of graphics hardware.

Fortunately, their competition's chips are much nicer.