AMD Releases 900+ Pages Of GPU Specs 325
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."
Its (Score:5, Funny)
It's It's, not Its (Score:2, Funny)
Re:It's It's, not Its (Score:5, Informative)
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Um, the summary says "expect more documentation (and 3D specifications) to arrive shortly".
I'll replace my nVidia when I see a good review. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I'll replace my nVidia when I see a good review (Score:3, Interesting)
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 suppl
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Are you on crack? Did anyone say anything about government? Has government ever made a peep about video cards and closed or open drivers? Did you read the summary before you spouted off?
STFU, FOAD, and take your paranoid attitude with you.
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Re:I'll replace my nVidia when I see a good review (Score:3, Insightful)
Since DELL has been shipping pre-installed Linux PCs, they will eventually favor ATI if it performs better than nVidia due to higher quality drivers.
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Amusingly, when I bought my Ubuntu PC from Dell's UK site a few weeks back the graphics card section had a giant ATi banner above it but only offered an NVidia card as an option. I assume that this is because right now NVidia's linux drivers are better, though neither are open source. Hopefully this'll change soon.
(Interestingly, the system shipped without NVidia's drivers installed, so I had to explicitly install NVidia's driver using the Restricted Driver Manager. I suppose you could argue that NVidia's
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Re:I'll replace my nVidia when I see a good review (Score:5, Funny)
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."
You may be right ... (Score:2)
And that I should send a copy of the receipt to AMD along with the explanation that the only reason I spent that money was so I could run Ubuntu with the new Free video driver? And that I should say that the system I'm replacing was Intel/nVidia?
Well, if you say I should, that's good enough for me.
And you go on to say that everyone who buys an ATI card because of this should also send a letter (not email) to ATI saying the sam
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The big effect will be if every Linux OEM started shipping Radeon in every box, that could be a pretty big number of lost potential sales that they weren't considered for solely based on software.
This could really be huge in the progress towards making Linux mainstream. The last few times I've installed Linux, installing my 3D drive for nVidia has required a few steps most users wouldn't or couldn't do. Several distros won't automat
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Re:You may be right ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Was Matrox even producing products at that point, or were you expecting one of the other six guys with old Matrox cards to support your drivers?
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The world does not revolve around 3D. Matrox produce fine gear for high-quality 2D work, like medical imaging.
3 options. (Score:3, Insightful)
#2. Send it to nVidia to show the profit that is going to their competitor from a FORMER customer.
#3. Send it to BOTH.
Re:You may be right ... (Score:4, Funny)
Where's the -1 delusional mod?
Sound interesting... (Score:5, Funny)
Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been recommending nVidia cards to everyone who asks, simply because their Linux support has been leagues ahead of ATI (now AMD, for those who haven't been paying attention). If the specs are credible enough to create a quality Free driver, then I'll switch to AMD in a heart beat.
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
It's about fucking time that companies realize the trickle-down effect of abusing nerds. Who do the ignorant masses go to when they need advice? Their nerdy friend...
ATI lost market share for almost the exact reason that IE did (albeit to less extent).
Re: closed nVidia support actually bad (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
Re:Great (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I have to wonder -- I really have no idea about ATI GPU parts, but the impression I got is that they are releasing the specs for the new top-of-the-line units, and since I don't even play games, I'm not interested in such things. What I'm interested in is having dual-display, TV output, 2D acceleration and XV working on the budget cards (and without making VGA BIOS calls, thank you very much), but I have yet to hear whether these released specifications will cover enough to create a truly free, fully featured driver for the budget model GPUs.
Also, apart from budget models, how will these specifications apply to older cards? I still have a Radeon 7500 lying in a drawer doing nothing just because I never got the TV output working on it in Linux. As a side story on that one, I even engaged in communications with ATI to try and get some specifications on that card in order to enhance the X driver with TV output support, but even when I managed to get my hands on documentation, it conspicuously excluded any information on the registers controlling the TV output encoder (even though I had explicitly requested that information...). That's when I resigned myself and bought a GeForce 5200 instead.
Re:Great (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Great (Score:4, Interesting)
is this or is this not the proof that ATI is the solution for linux graphics?
For those of us who absolutely refuse to use closed sourced drivers their older cards have already proven to be the best solution for desktops.
Re:Great (Score:4, Insightful)
It will be, in a few weeks. Moreso in a few months as the drivers improve. Performance tuning is one of the open source methodology's strengths.
May be best for HTPC (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
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Well hold on there (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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But it can finally be done (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider this: I'm actually surprised how far nouveau development already went, without any specs and starting from the obfuscated nv driver. How much further could they be now if they had the specs and didn't have to waste uncountable hours tracing register changes and second-guessing their use?
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No they haven't (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Sweet! (Score:5, Informative)
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Furthermore, BSD / vs linux vs Solaris. No, IMHO closed source drivers just suck in all cases. We need the specs. Specs for all hardware would allow us to have working scanners, webcams, wifi adapters, etc.
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Closed-source drivers can be OK, except they tend to discontinue support after a while.
Exactly. I have an aging GeForce 4 that's slow by current standards but still quite enough to mess around with Beryl and play Unreal Tournament. And yet, Nvidia has deprecated its drivers. When new kernels can no longer load the old module, I'll have to decide between resigning myself to that kernel version forever on this system or forking out a comparatively huge amount of cash. (Since this is an AGP system, I'll also have to replace the motherboard. And CPU. And memory. And probably throw in an
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Insightful)
Your reading comprehension is worse than your grammar. By 20, you mean 5. It still "[something] useful work in a modern fashion", except that it's been artificially crippled by recent driver updates.
Child, meet Market. Customers don't want to spend more money than they have to. Paradoxically, this often means they'll spend even more money with the companies that don't put the squeeze on them.
Re:Sweet! Sour!! (Score:5, Insightful)
For the record, Nvidia says otherwise [nvidia.com].
"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?
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I wish I had mod points -- the question would be funny or insightful though -- it's both.
With respect to your previous comment, I upgraded my system last weekend and I didn't really get $500 worth of improvement. My old motherboard was on the verge of fritzing though so it had to be done (Athlon XP 2200+ system), and even though the various parts are maybe 4 years old, noth
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When investigating for info on updated drivers th
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Actually (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Bullshit. I haven't had to upgrade my PC through the last three releases and it works fine. Hell, I have Vista running on a laptop with only a 1.4GHz processor and it runs fine. That's with Aero enabled (my understanding is that this would be roughly equivalent to Ubuntu with Beryl and Compiz correct? and have I spelt that right?)
I think the main problem with Linux is that if a vendor releases a closed source driver (which some are obliged to do by legal agreements for other companies technologies) that
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Hear here! I have an ANCIENT AMD K6-2/450 doing backups. It has 2.5 TB of hard disks in it, and its only purpose in life is to copy files over the network every day. It's 10 years old, and has been in continuous 24x7 duty all along. Rock stable, too - why change it when it work
It seems to me... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:It seems to me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It seems to me... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Linux kind of carried the Opteron for the first year or so, since it had 64-bit and NUMA support, while M$ obligingly waited to release any such thing until Intel had an offering as well.
Opteron released: April 22, 2003.
Windows 2003 released: April 24, 2003.
2 days != a "year or so".
Re:It seems to me... (Score:4, Informative)
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In fact, I know nobody who actually uses 64-bit Windows at home. Everyone has his AMD64-compatible setup, but even Vista goes purely in 32-bit mode because the 64-bit version has compatibility problems, stability or performance issues etc.
The only boxen I've seen actually make use of their 64-bit architecture were Linux boxen and Macs (kind of; pure 64-bit mode
Re:It seems to me... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
AMD has actually been making moves for a long time so this isn't as large a step for them. Even before the amd64 cpus came out AMD had specs available and a machine simulator as well as several kernel developers working on getting Linux to run on their hardware.
On the other hand this is a huge step for ATI and I may very well find myself reconsidering my ATI boycott.
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See, the boycott worked!
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Although I think you're probably right on the amount of geek cred google gets for the computing grid, I'll bet that you'll probably need to flip the two arguements around - the word of mouth and market share are driven by great product, not
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Dude, seriously? "Does it run Linux?" was such an important question in the common mindset here that it has become a meme.
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Or, as you implicitly suggest later but don't actually say: greater mindshare amongst technologically literate and influential people. My opinion (which is worth what you're paying for it) is that such people wield widely-underestimated power in the mid and long term.
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It is nice that AMD gave the 2D specs away. I will go to great when they give out the 3-D specs. I will buy and AMDTI video card when we have good working drivers.
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Re:It seems to me... (Score:5, Funny)
This conspiracy theory seems incomplete. Did Jimmy Hoffa steal the search technology from Area 51's crashed Roswell UFO, and masqueraded as JFK when FSF supporters attempted to assassinate him for creating the possibility of a faked Apollo moon landing, then went into hiding for many years as Lord Lucan, fathered Princess Diana's unborn child, found Elvis and Marilyn Monroe alive and well in Atlantis, flew an Aurora spy-plane powered by water-fuelled engines through the hole in the North Pole into an unknown hollow Earth down to the South Pole, took this fabled Google search technology to the secret Illuminati base in Antarctica before heading north again, annoyed the Pope and Opus Dei and the long-lost descendants of Jesus Christ and finally became integrated into the Project for a New American Century's headquarters, the NSA - which was almost obliterated when the international Zionist conspiracy felled the Twin Towers with explosives and thermite in the fraudulent September the 11th attacks?
To be honest, you're not trying very hard. Or giving the real-world NSA lots of credit and assuming no end of competence on their behalf. They've cracked every form of encryption as well, right?
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Hopefully a meaningful contribution (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Hopefully a meaningful contribution (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yes, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Teaser indeed... (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing that gets me is that Wikipedia seems to know more about the ATI chips than ATI. Of course this can't actually be the case, but I think it is somewhat telling that ATI is not the authoritative reference for even their own hardware. There seems to be some uneasiness with releasing the full product specs, which suggests to me that they don't have a real committment to openness.
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 hi
Re:Teaser indeed... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Yes, I know there have been some attempts at reverse-engineering the older cards' video ports, but it's spotty, difficult to use, and if I remember correctly, re
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Re:Hopefully a meaningful contribution (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm, I now also see the ATI FireGL V7600 runs the RV630 too. Maybe that could work out for something too...
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In the past the hardware did not change much between releases (which is why one can have unified drivers). In particular, having documentation for one card goes a very long way to figuring out how to use a similar, slightly modified card. What happened after R300 is that ATI ripped out their 2d engine which made it impossible to figure out how to set modes on the new cards. Thus, we did not even have a 2d X-server, let alone 3d. With this docu
Nice, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Just imagine an SLI'd Beowulf cluster of these!
np: Masha Qrella - Insecure (Luck)
Wow! (Score:4, Funny)
I guess we can thank Dell for pressuring ATI for better Linux support.
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Informative)
Read David's blog - http://airlied.livejournal.com/ [livejournal.com] - there are a whole pile of potential problems about that driver. David accepts that it was on questionable ground, and so it will probably never see the light of day.
ati on ubuntu dell laptops? (Score:2)
Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice bit of good news anyway.
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900 pages? (Score:5, Funny)
Come off it... that's not even enough for an Office document standard.
Worthless!
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(jk, not troll)
My next box will go ati (Score:2)
Amazing, we're saved! (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Next graphics card: Ati (Score:2)
Thanks AMD for taking this step!
So, which cards does this cover? (Score:3, Interesting)
900+ you say? (Score:2)
Mobile and IGP GPUs? (Score:2)
I'm not in the market now...but in a year or so... (Score:3, Interesting)
Last year I did an evaluation, and Intel came out on top
N.B.: For me to choose Intel it must be 5% better than the competition. This is due to various corporate actions that I dislike. (Two years ago it was 10%...I use a time decaying function.) If they were up against a competitor that didn't support DRM, they'd need to be 50% better, but I don't see one, so that part of the playing field is level.
My next cards will be ATI (Score:3, Interesting)
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As I understand it, the X.org DRI (Direct Rendering Infrastructure) project are doing just that. In fact, they have been doing just that for ATI cards (among others) for some time, but progress has been slow, because they've needed to reverse-engineer everything (they previously could get specs with an NDA, but not since
High end is good but... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Slashdot: Yay! [mwscomp.com]
Re:Within (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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1. Get documentation
2. Have fun
3. Have more fun
4. Have fun and profit !