Re: HARDWARE: Open-Source-Friendly Graphics Cards -- Viable?

[Rene Herman]

Kevin Puetz wrote:

> Rene Herman wrote:
>
> > I'd actually prefer AMD, but the AMD market isn't offfering a solution
> > comparable to Intel's integrated video. That means AMD and VIA and the
> > like are loosing (some, mine at least :-) money since they don't have a
> > graphics solution comparable to Intel, in terms of openness and
> > basicness. I believe really only nForce and (to a degree; I hardly see
> > it) ATI IGP are available in the AMD motherboard market. If you could
> > produce something as good or better as Intel's, you might want to go
> > talk to VIA, or AMD directly, and have them license it from you and
> > massproduce it into their chipsets.
>
>
> Well, there are the via k8m800 chipsets.

I see, must say I hadn't seen it before. Have basically stopped paying 
attention to VIA some time ago but read lately (mostly on this list, I 
believe) that they were actually getting better at opening up some 
things. When I just now checked, I see there's still not a datasheet in 
sight though. As far as I can see best I can hope for is that VIA would 
consider me "an appropriate open source developer" which, considering 
that I will not be developing for many things I still like to read the 
datasheets for, seems unlikely. But more to the point, even if it were 
likely, the competition here is developer.intel.com, not $RANDOMCORP's 
discretion.

From this, VIA seems a bit better than nVidia (if only because it would 
be hard to be worse) and comparable to ATI's developer program. Since I 
see that all the rest of their chipsets is equally undocumented, at 
least publicly, for me personally this means I will not be buying their 
products.

> That's (I believe?) a unichrome2 IGP, which should have opensource
> DRI support via unichrome.sf.net (caveat - I have a unichrome1 in an
> epia M1000, not the athlon64 variant). It's no hot-rod performer, but
> it's good enough for tuxracer and neverball. I have no idea how it
> really compares performance-wise to the intel stuff, but it does at
> least have open drivers and reasonable GL acceleration.

I see from unichrome.sf.net that they are piecing together register info 
from drivers they got VIA to release...

Okay, so talking to VIA was a bad idea. AMD is good with documentation 
(looking at printed copies of the AMD 751/756 datasheets as we speak) 
but haven't been too interested in chipsets upto now. They generally do 
one or a few and lay off when VIA gets upto speed. Not having anything 
basic and open available _is_ driving some customers to Intel though, so 
maybe they're still interested in it for a basic chipset, with VIA for 
the gadget-add market.

Rene.
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