AMD Publishes Vega Shader ISA Documentation

[kneekoo]

ISA Documentation? Nice. I wonder when the VLBUS Documentation will pop up.

[Frogging101]

It's really awesome to see AMD freely publishing these low level specifications

[bridgman]

ISA Documentation? Nice. I wonder when the VLBUS Documentation will pop up.

We're working on it

That reminds me, it's probably a good time to go through the pile of old computers and get rid of the PCI and older ones. Maybe the AGP ones as well just because of all the pain AGP has caused over the years.

[nanonyme]

We're working on it

That reminds me, it's probably a good time to go through the pile of old computers and get rid of the PCI and older ones. Maybe the AGP ones as well just because of all the pain AGP has caused over the years.

Maybe even take revenge on the AGP ones with a hammer?

[zanny]

And for the record: GNU folks (Stallman mostly) should get their heads out of their asses and start campaigning for open hardware. That's the only way to get a true FSF experience without restricting yourself to ancient obsolete shit.

It is cheap to sit at home and write code.

It is expensive to build a factory to fabricate silicon.

Right now, the free software movement is way too cash limited to attempt to build out its own hardware infrastructure, even if that is what we want.

[pal666]

It is cheap to sit at home and write code.

It is expensive to build a factory to fabricate silicon.

Right now, the free software movement is way too cash limited to attempt to build out its own hardware infrastructure, even if that is what we want.

free hardware has nothing to do with building factories

[bridgman]

It is expensive to build a factory to fabricate silicon.

It's just a big printer

Back in the early days of CMOS there were a number of different foundries offering small-batch production for a really good price, and every university was designing and building their own RISC processors. Those were the days when GPUs had thousands of transistors though, not billions.

[zboszor]

ISA Documentation? Nice. I wonder when the VLBUS Documentation will pop up.

An addendum to the ISA docs. We have successfully convinced a POS / PC maker recently to add extra Interrupt Source Override Structure descriptors in its ACPI implementation to support Linux because the ACPI spec doesn't distinguish between LPC bus and ISA bus. With ISA, the IRQ is high-active edge-triggered. Serial devices behind the LPC bus based SuperIO chip didn't work because the IRQs there are low-active level triggered. Unlike Microsoft Windows, Linux doesn't obsolete old machines and therefore it cannot know that the "ISA bus" is not the old ISA bus anymore so it can't make the right IRQ setup in the interrupt controller unless the ACPI tables contain the correct info explicitly.

[linuxgeex]

ISA Documentation? Nice. I wonder when the VLBUS Documentation will pop up.

okay if you really want to make vague blast from the past references, when will the Zorro3 and MCA docs show up?

[zboszor]

BTW, I am also happy that the ISA docs is available, I can make games for the Vega. But I don't know why is everyone so excited about it, the Zilog Z80 ISA documentation is available since about forever and the ZX Vega is out for about two years now. ;-)