AMD/ATI opening specs

[David Munson]

That's fantastic, and I have two questions related to this that I
didn't see addressed in the articles that I found:

1. Will this include Crossfire (ATI multi-card... thingy) for those who use it?
This isn't absolutely vital, but it would be nice since you can use
cards in a Crossfire setup (assuming it's supported in hw/sw) to
handle physics processing. This leads naturally to my next question...

2. Assuming the cards have the architecture to do so, will it be
possible to offload other processing to them? Sort of like the nVidia
Tesla project/product, only using standard graphics cards instead of
all that fancy Tesla hardware or expensive business graphics
processors. I guess I'm wondering if you could put a standard gaming
card to work for the same functions that nVidia's Quadro and ATI's
FireGL lines would handle, or like what the Aegia PhysX, or even
offload the network processing to a cheap one, like with the
KillerNIC. Maybe not at the same performance level, but it's along the
lines of what I'm wondering.

Wikipedia entry on Tesla (interesting stuff, supercomputer-level
performance in a 1U server):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVIDIA_Tesla

Not sure if anyone can answer this, or even cares to, but it's a
question and it's mostly on-topic, unlike some of my contributions. :)

On 9/6/07, der.hans <PLUGd at lufthans.com> wrote:
> Am 05. Sep, 2007 schwätzte Darrin Chandler so:
>
> > On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 01:02:52PM -0700, der.hans wrote:
> >> AMD has announced it will be making specifications available for
> >> developing Free Software drivers for new ATI cards.
> >>
> >> http://lwn.net/Articles/248227/
> >
> > This seems promising!
>
> Yes, and follow-up today makes it look even better.
>
> http://www.newsforge.net/feature/119049
>
> The licensing choices brings up some probs for *BSD, but if the specs are
> available the GPL parts can be re-implemented. They'll also give code that
> can be studied and used to test against.
>
> ciao,
>
> der.hans
> --
> #  https://www.LuftHans.com/        http://www.CiscoLearning.org/
> #  "Luckily, this is a comic book, for which no idea is too complex."
> #    -- Larry Gonick from The Cartoon History of the United States
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