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."

Its

[Anonymous Coward]

over NINE HUNDRED!!

Sound interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

no, wait, the other thing - tedious.

Nice, but...

[Briareos]

...will that GPU run Linux?

Just imagine an SLI'd Beowulf cluster of these!

np: Masha Qrella - Insecure (Luck)

Wow!

[nonsequitor]

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.

Re:Hopefully a meaningful contribution

[CaptainPatent]

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...

Not to mention violating our ears too!

900 pages?

[26199]

Come off it... that's not even enough for an Office document standard.

Worthless!

Amazing, we're saved!

[Duncan3]

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.

It's It's, not Its

[bilbravo]

google it. :-)

Re:It seems to me...

[MrNaz]

Given that Google's initial search technolgy seems to have come out of nowhere and that Google had secretive high government clearance contacts from day one, I think the more likely scenario is the NSA rolling up to Larry and Sergi and saying "we need public sector lovable geek mascots to hide behind while we monitor the population's activities. You two seem suitable and have the right profiles. Here's some search tech, and we'll set you up with the right venture capital connections [sequoiacap.com]. No go profile everybody."

Re:It's It's, not Its

[Anonymous Coward]

WHAT nine HUNDRED?!

Re:It seems to me...

[Ford Prefect]

I think the more likely scenario is the NSA rolling up to Larry and Sergi and saying "we need public sector lovable geek mascots to hide behind while we monitor the population's activities. You two seem suitable and have the right profiles. Here's some search tech, and we'll set you up with the right venture capital connections. No go profile everybody."

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?

Re:You may be right ...

[Chandon Seldon]

Okay, I'm being pessimistic - but something pretty similar happened after Matrox released the specifications for its 3D graphics cards. There were fully open-source drivers, but they weren't exactly high-quality. I moved on to Nvidia after that...

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?

Re:You may be right ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Where's the -1 delusional mod?

Re:obvious disconnect

[Anonymous Coward]

How would you even know they had good image quality if they had crappy drivers? Does not compute, unless you got lucky and bought the magical cards that ran without drivers. Or is that just some rumors you heard on the internets?

What are you, a retard? Display drivers have nothing to do with image quality -- that's the result of the hardware going out to the monitor plug. A cheap board will be fuzzier and its colors will be less crisp. All the ATI cards I've had gave me sharp, clear images with vibrant color and little bleeding.
  Even if drivers affected that (which they don't) how bad do you think the drivers are? Do you think they made me blind? Or are you some kind of fucked-up idiot who can't tell the difference between "crappy drivers" and "no drivers at all"?
  Crappy drivers may be slow, or they might have bugs, but they're drivers. ATI's hardware has always been good. Their drivers, OTOH, range all the way from "pretty good" to a "poke in the eye with a sharp stick."

Re:Wow!

[lasse_dk]

if it only takes a week to write a driver with 900 pages of spec, how long can it take to write one with no spec?

Re:I'll replace my nVidia when I see a good review

[red_dragon]

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."

Re:Sweet! Sour!!

[anagama]

"Thank you, oh benevolent masters, for supplying the software required to use the hardware that you gave me in exchange for money."

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, nothing fits in the new motherboards anymore. Thank goodness I had an old PCI IDE card in the closet -- none of my HDs are SATA.

I'm proabably one of the few people who went out specifically looking for a GMA950 motherboard -- I was impressed with how well Fusion ran on my macbook with the open source drivers compared to how it worked on my Desktop/nVidia system. I still am impressed with that on my new Desktop, I'm just dissapointed in the ridiculously long BIOS startup time which negates the quicker boot time (from the grub prompt). If I could have found the GMA950 on an add-in card, I would have bought that and stuck with AMD processors. At least I'll still get to help out AMD and buy a video card once a bit of driver work gets done.

As for the old board, which is basically a complete system sans drive (well, I have a couple unused 40gb drives in the closet), powersupply (one of those in the closet too, though I can't remember if it works), and case (in the closet, no powersupply, small case requires specially sized PS), I decided to try my hand at replacing capacitors -- 3 had leaked and one was bulging. If I get lucky, I'll have that old machine back for other uses.

Re:Something along the lines of

[Ruie]

No, it like this:

1. Get documentation
2. Have fun
3. Have more fun
4. Have fun and profit !

Re:Great

[rtyall]

Yes, thank the heavens that you have two low-end/cheap video cards from different manufacturers.