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Posted Sep 6, 2007 1:33 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: Hardware without Specifications by jwmittag
Parent article: AMD to open up graphics specs

"Only the paranoid survive" is Intel's motto (and their competitors feel much the same way).

A lot of the big chip designers don't trust their own people with the company's own designs; everything is need-to-know. And then there are all of the details of operation that simply aren't written down anywhere; the driver guys ask the hardware guys questions when they get stuck, and sometimes comments in the driver is pretty much the only documentation for some of the tricky bits, other than comments in the (Verilog or VHDL) RTL source code, and there's no way anyone's going to get to see that.