News ATI drivers

[Alex Deucher]

On 9/12/07, Ville Syrjälä <syrjala at sci.fi> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 05:34:44PM +0100, Daniel Stone wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 10:43:12PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > > On Wednesday 05 September 2007, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> > > >as everyone has probably seen already, AMD just publicly promised specs
> > > >and a reference driver for all cards starting with R500. Great.
> > > >Now, for people in the know, is that just a(nother) promise yet, or are
> > > >there already Xorg people involved in this new driver ?
> > >
> > > They do this (wait, cue the trumpets for the std fanfare) about every two
> > > years, and so far as I know, not one single line of code has been thrown over
> > > the fence.  I've wasted well over $500 down through the years, money spent
> > > because they promised this or that.
> > >
> > > All it was in the boardroom was a minor uptick in sales, with no connection
> > > between the uptick and the propaganda machines output ever being grokked by
> > > anybody at ATI.
> > >
> > > Don't even think of holding your breath, you'll be long dead and buried &
> > > still no open src ATI drivers, for any of their cards.
> >
> > http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/
>
> Is that it or will there be more datasheets later? These have no information
> on the accelerator.

on r5xx the 2D accelerator is the same as the older radeons.  the 2D
engine is gone altogether on the r6xx chips.  It's emulated by the
microcode however.  More info on this should be forthcoming.  For 3D,
the r5xx is similar to r4xx and r6xx is all new.

Alex