4 ms·
"Hardware doesn't come with programming manuals anymore as it is deemed too complex (yeah right) and expensive." It doesn't come with manuals because it is con
by Annatar 8y ago
"Hardware doesn't come with programming manuals anymore as it is deemed too complex (yeah right) and expensive."
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?)
- AstralStorm 8y agoRarely 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.
- pjmlp 8y agoI remember that Amiga programming manuals had to be additionally bought from Commodore.
- Annatar 8y agoBut 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.
- richrichardsson 8y agoThe 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.
- IronBacon 8y agoI 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... ^__^;)
- rwallace 8y agoHasn't that changed in recent years? I've seen manuals for recent AMD GPU instruction sets.