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You can be sure they don'tYou can be sure they don'tPosted Feb 14, 2008 17:56 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)In reply to: You can be sure they don't by flewellyn Parent article: AMD's open GPU documentation site
It's not unusual that the knowledge about how hardware works is codified in QA procedures, designer knowledge, and a lot of notes that don't form a coherent document. The economics of this particular market is that there really isn't time to write up documents that will explain how to use the hardware to an outsider before the device needs to have drivers already written and available to the public, and there's been little reason to write up such documents after the driver is written. Furthermore, there are a lot of corner cases, where the vendor driver doesn't try doing something, and the hardware designers didn't except the driver writers to try it, and so nobody's bothered to figure out if it would cause problems or not. They avoid trying to evaluate a combinatorial explosion of unknown interactions by only checking the ones that people are interested in, which is a big help in getting work done in a reasonable amount of time, but only if the process is interactive. (And it's likely that a different implementation of high-level 3D operations on the low-level units they have would hit different combinations than the ones that the designers have verified to work together)
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You can be sure they don't Posted Feb 14, 2008 19:38 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] From the sound of things, they'd benefit hugely from an open development model. :-)
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