Northern Islands HDMI audio?

[barkas]

It's frustrating how difficult this seems to be for ATI/AMD. Sometimes I think we would be better off with a reverse engineered driver where the developers hack what they can and don't have to wait years for some legal review at AMD.

[bridgman]

It's frustrating how difficult this seems to be for ATI/AMD. Sometimes I think we would be better off with a reverse engineered driver where the developers hack what they can and don't have to wait years for some legal review at AMD.

Not sure I understand. The info has already been released AFAIK, it's "just" a question of getting that information integrated into the driver.

I say "just" not to trivialize it, but to distinguish that effort from IP review and release.

If you're talking about the audio driver (not our area but maybe we can help) the spec I was talking about was Intel HD Audio aka Azalia. I was told there was an update to the public spec in 2010 which added multichannel support but I haven't had a chance to look at the actual docs yet.

[Zajec]

If you're talking about the audio driver (not our area but maybe we can help) the spec I was talking about was Intel HD Audio aka Azalia. I was told there was an update to the public spec in 2010 which added multichannel support but I haven't had a chance to look at the actual docs yet.

Then you must mean:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/xa/...ification.html
(updated June 17, 2010).

[bridgman]

Yeah, but I was told it was a v2 update (instead of 1.0a), and when I looked in the change log for the doc most of the entries were pretty cryptic. I haven't had time to sit down and diff the two docs to see what was actually added.

[barkas]

Not sure I understand. The info has already been released AFAIK, it's "just" a question of getting that information integrated into the driver.

I say "just" not to trivialize it, but to distinguish that effort from IP review and release.

If you're talking about the audio driver (not our area but maybe we can help) the spec I was talking about was Intel HD Audio aka Azalia. I was told there was an update to the public spec in 2010 which added multichannel support but I haven't had a chance to look at the actual docs yet.

Just generalized frustration. I was stupid enough to again buy an ATI GPU and progress is so painfully slow. In fact, when the ATI drivers was ok, the nouveau driver wasn't even there. Now, I am told the Nouveau driver is better than the ATI driver even though it's reverse engineered and the ATI one is supported by the manufacturer.

This evergreen / NI HDMI audio debacle is just an example of how long it takes to integrate a basic feature.

[Zajec]

Just generalized frustration. I was stupid enough to again buy an ATI GPU and progress is so painfully slow. In fact, when the ATI drivers was ok, the nouveau driver wasn't even there. Now, I am told the Nouveau driver is better than the ATI driver even though it's reverse engineered and the ATI one is supported by the manufacturer.

This evergreen / NI HDMI audio debacle is just an example of how long it takes to integrate a basic feature.

AMD was "always" quite clear about features they're working on. We knew since years to not expect official HDMI audio or UVD support. On the other hand noone is making any problems to include support for such things coming from independent developers and RE.
That's quite perfect for me. They do great job around basics and RE guys can focus on few specific things only. If we had to RE everything, radeon wouldn't be in it's current state for few next years.