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Paying nVidiaPaying nVidiaPosted Jan 17, 2007 16:10 UTC (Wed) by marduk (subscriber, #3831)In reply to: Paying nVidia by mattmelton Parent article: LCA: The state of the Nouveau project
Even if your statements are true, and it has been dutifully debated so I won't even bother to do that here, all nVidia has to do is release the technical details of how to *program* the card, not how the card was written. I'm sure there are more than enough developers in the OSS community that know how to read technical specifications. You don't, for example, have to know how Intel designs and builds Xeons in order to program one now do you?
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Paying nVidia Posted Jan 18, 2007 10:07 UTC (Thu) by gyles (guest, #1600) [Link]
In the case of the Xeon all the instructions fed to it are from the known x86 instruction set (plus SSE etc.). The Xeon then translates these to micro-ops and executes them. Thus knowing the instruction set reveals nothing about the internals of the chip.
The nVidia chip is designed to optimise the whole chain, and does not have to adhere to a published interface at the hardware level. To maintain performance there cannot be the same sort of translations as the Xeon performs. Thus knowing the language fed to the hardware is more revealing about the hardware itself.
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