AMD releases R600 GPU specifications
AMD has made a document called R600-Family Instruction Set Architecture (PDF) available to X.org Foundation developers. The detailed information will promote the development of the open source radeonhd driver. This driver has so far not supported 3D acceleration on R600-based graphics cards.
In addition, the vendor shortly plans to release its "3D Programmers Guide" dealing specifically with graphics programming. However, the parallel processing units of the R600 graphics chips can also be used as powerful number crunchers. AMD already offers a suitable platform, while Nvidia's CUDA is a similar solution for Nvidia graphics cards – neither of them, however, has so far become available as open source.
(trk)