"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. The 2D specifications will be released very soon and the 3D ones will follow shortly."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2007-07-13
Kaiwai,
I've also been looking at laptops (available in New Zealand) that are great for software development for around NZ$3k (~US$2100). Check out the HP 8510w if you haven't already. For the longest time this line of models (starting with the nw84x0 series) only had ATI graphics, which sucked on Linux, until now! Good on AMD/ATI! Due to the sucky support of ATI on Linux I was looking around at alternatives to this line of laptop for my next machine. But ATI's announcement means they're back in the running.
By the way, the 8510w is not now restricted to ATI only, you can now choose either NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M or ATI FireL V5600. You can't lose.
Apologies everyone else for the first bit being only weakly related to the thread about the ATI spec release (disclaimer: I don't work for HP or AMD/ATI, just wanna see that fellow coders are made aware of good kit). But I feel that this news from AMD might make a difference to people's purchasing decisions (provided AMD actually deliver).
Now back to your usual programme ...
Edited 2007-09-11 03:19
Member since:2005-10-09
You both should check out http://lenovo.com .
The T-series is awesome. http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki for more info.
Member since:2005-07-06
I have a dv6209tx which is a Core 2 1.83Ghz with an nVidia go 7400 - basically it runs every operating system I've chucked at it. OpenSolaris runs nicely, along with Fedora, Ubuntu and SLED 10 SP1. With 2gigs of memory, you could say its a little pocket-rocket.
Its all basically going to hinge on what Intel does with their GPU designs and also what happens with the 'gpu extensions' ala SSE4 being promoted by AMD. Its difficult to envision where the future will lead but I hope that it'll force all players in the market from relying on 'secret sauce' and instead compete based on technical merit and branding instead.
Member since:2007-04-06
Linuxism is bad but *nixism is good ? lets go one step further and say *nixism is bad also and *ism is the good "ism" here yes ? no ? if no why ?
Member since:2005-07-06
Code riddled with uniquely Linux'isms and GNU'isms are bad; name one thing out there which is riddled with UNIX'isms, or more correctly features which are ism's that are not mentioned in the UNIX specification which Linux fails to implement.
Member since:2005-08-18
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-12-13
They have been making these sort of statements for years. Why is this any different? Why could they not release the specs at the X Summit? It would have been great PR and eliminated some of the scepticism.
The OSS train has already left the station and ATI is still buying the ticket. Even if they do release the specs, Intel and NVidia are still years ahead of them in development and distribution.
Member since:2006-11-08
Member since:
2005-07-06
Well, there lies the problem. The R300 was meant to receive the 'full specifications' and every time the developers asked for more assistance and explanation, all they got in return from AMD was 'you've got it all, piss off and stop whining'.
For me, I'm not going to believe it till I see a real working product that is either equal or better than the closed source one. If I am going to spend NZ$3K on a laptop, I want to be damn sure it'll actually be fully supported rather than 'kinda supported and really buggy'.
Also, I certainly don't want to see a tonne of Linux'isms within the driver that'll make porting it to *BSD's and other UNIX's more difficult than it needs to be. Open source application developers are already thinking the world revolves around Linux, lets hope that the driver developers have more common-sense than that.
Edited 2007-09-11 02:40