Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by wmf on Wednesday March 19, 2025 @08:52PM
(#43418876)
Intel and AMD GPUs have public documentation and open source drivers.
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Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by ForTheKidz on Thursday March 20, 2025 @02:01AM
(#43420212)
Does "open source drivers" imply documentation of the underlying ISA or just the tooling to shepherd it? How much code would I need to go from bootloader to quake 2 assuming I only needed to play that one piece of software on my one card?
Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by almostgotcaught on Thursday March 20, 2025 @03:27AM
(#43420515)
https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/instinct-te...
The compiler is LLVM
https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/llvm/lib/Targ...
It's all there. For the driver/runtime everything is also open and upstreamed into the Linux kernel (register map and pcie bar and etc). The packet protocol isn't well-documented but documented enough that tinygrad managed to build their own driver from scratch.
Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by ForTheKidz on Thursday March 20, 2025 @05:12AM
(#43421087)
Oh wow, that's very impressive documentation. We might actually see an opportunity to move beyond linux and closed drivers in this lifetime.
Re:Looking Ahead at Intel's Xe3 GPU Architecture
by adrian_b on Friday March 21, 2025 @11:02AM
(#43436531)
While the AMD ISA documentation has been slightly improving during the last years, so the document about RDNA 3.5 is noticeably better than older documents, Intel has failed to publish the documentation for the latest Xe versions, even if in the past its GPU documentation was much better than that of AMD.
Intel still has to publish several additional manuals, to cover Xe in Meteor Lake, Xe in Arrow Lake H, Xe 2 in Lunar Lake and Xe 2 in discrete GPUs, and then Xe 3 in Panther Lake, to bring their documentation up to date.
You can extract most of the GPU information from the open-source Linux drivers and LLVM compiling back-end, but this is a poor substitute for actual GPU ISA documentation.