Re:Learning BASIC Like It's 1983
by AstralStorm on Monday September 03, 2018 @09:10AM
(#17902381)
Rarely it is the case that showing relevant performance characteristics and APIs really exposes anything. AMD is perfectly fine with exposing the programming manual and most of setup code - it is not where the real important secrets lie...
It takes time to produce useful documentation though.
I would also guess that RIAA/MPAA are somewhat responsible with the secrecy to enforce the DRM.
I've read a discussion in a forum where an AMD employee when questioned if it was possible to have a GPU's FW without DRM (or something like that) his answer was that would probably be a commercial suicide (OK, I'm little tired right now and I'm not recalling all the details of the conversation but I can try to dig it up... ^__^;)
Hasn't that changed in recent years? I've seen manuals for recent AMD GPU instruction sets.
I remember that Amiga programming manuals had to be additionally bought from Commodore.
But they were available, and most of us used the optical character recognition scanned version on the LSD doc disk.
25 years later I bought the real thing.
Re:Learning BASIC Like It's 1983
by richrichardsson on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @03:50AM
(#17907327)
The hardware reference manual was published by Addison-Wesley. Gave me a little nostalgia ping when I noticed the Stroustrup C++ book I bought recently was also published by them.
It doesn't come with manuals because it is considered a trade secret. Commodore had to lay the hardware bare because it wasn't fast enough to program in a high level language nor did the high level languages fully support their hardware, whereas the hardware of today is so fast that nobody thinks anything of it programming it through a driver or a shared object library in a high level language. It's still wrong not to lay the hardware registers and their functionality bare (yes NVIDIA, have you forgotten your SGI roots?)