AMD: GPU Specifications Without NDAs!

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD: GPU Specifications Without NDAs!

This morning at the X Developer Summit in the United Kingdom, Matthew Tippett and John Bridgman of AMD have announced that they will be releasing their ATI GPU specifications without any Non-Disclosure Agreements needed by the developers! In other words, their GPU specifications will be given to developers in the open. Therefore you shouldn't need to worry about another R200 incident taking place.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=NjA0Ng

[yoshi314]

*sigh of relief* :]

i was getting paranoid there with those nda words floating around.

[oliver]

One reaction could be "it's about friggin' time" or "this is how it supposed to be anyhow"

I prefer, That is so awesome!

Hopefully people will start building nice drivers now too.

I guess it's time to be happy I stuck with ATi/AMD through all these years.

[yoshi314]

I guess it's time to be happy I stuck with ATi/AMD through all these years.

not just yet. we don't have our hands either on 8.41 or new opensource driver or amd specs, do we?

[Svartalf]

Originally Posted by yoshi314

not just yet. we don't have our hands either on 8.41 or new opensource driver or amd specs, do we?

Indeed... While I'm really upbeat about what I'm being told right at the moment, the reality is, until they deliver, it's just more promises- I'm willing to wait and see because of the nature of the promises being made, but in the end, it's just that...promises.

[oliver]

If I was pessimistic all this time I would have switched to Intel/Nvidia ages ago, now wouldn't I?

I'm a (maybe foolish) hopeful person.

And if AMD doesn't deliver? not the .41 and not the .42, then what would keep Micheal (or others of course) from 'leaking' the beta driver? If they'd screw us over that massively, then it would only be 'right' to leak it I think.

[d2kx]

Let's see what nVidia does.

[oliver]

Ever since nVidia said publicly (don't ask for link, I tried to find it again, but couldn't it was an old article, thing geforce2 eta) that they where opposed to OSS, I have been opposed nVidia.

You may claim that they offer OSS drivers for some of their chipsets, but I don't think they are theirs (I don't check it that regularly). They used to offer their own binary only net driver for example for a while, and now point to the forcedeth driver, which is reversed engineerd. So for me, nVidia, no thank you. Of course companies can always change their views.

[TechMage89]

This is superb! Now I just have to learn how to develop drivers...

[immudium]

That's great and I look forward to ATI's continued improvement on Linux. Nonetheless, in the short term, there's not a lot to be all that excited about really. NVidia has always been good to the Linux community. They adopted and integrated the XOrg compositing extensions to support Compiz and Beryl pretty damn quickly. Does AMD even have anything in that area at all yet? Even in the new "improved" 8.41 driver? Not that I've heard of. Again exciting stuff, but my excitement is pretty tempered by the current state of affairs. I fairly recently got a new dual core machine at work and to my horror it had an ATI card in it. Well I immediately had to go beg and plead to the IT gods for an NVidia card so that I could get my Beryl rocking again. Well turns out the IT guy even apologized to me about putting in an ATI/AMD card and he's a Windows guy. So apparently it sucks there too. I wouldn't know. As long as NVidia delivers the goods, I'll let them beat me with their closed source dead fish for as long as they want.