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Because the GPU market is so competitive, low-level technical details for all modern architectures remain proprietary. Except for Intel, which publishes lots o
by userbinator 3y ago
Because the GPU market is so competitive, low-level technical details for all modern architectures remain proprietary.
Except for Intel, which publishes lots of technical documentation on their GPUs: https://kiwitree.net/~lina/intel-gfx-docs/prm/ https://kiwitree.net/~lina/intel-gfx-docs/prm/
You can also find the i810/815 manuals elsewhere online, but except for an odd gap between that and the 965 (i.e. missing the 855/910/915/945) for some reason, they've been pretty consistent with the documentation.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoThe Linux drivers are also high quality and mainlined. Wish every company followed their lead.
- EasyMark 3y agoMy cheap little dell laptop is the most solid machine I have in my house and I haven't seen it crash yet and I half suspect it's because it's the only one with Intel gpu only in it :) . My tower machine can go a few days without crashing but inevitably it will whether it's 3 days or 1 week. Nvidia card. It's not often enough to really worry about but I've been thinking about switching to an AMD card, if I can find a second hand one reasonably priced.
- kimixa 3y agoAMD also publish a fair bit of documentation - https://www.amd.com/en/developer/browse-by-resource-type/documentation.html https://www.amd.com/en/developer/browse-by-resource-type/doc... Includes full ISA documentation of their current and past offerings, though look like they tend to be aimed at implementors rather than "high level" description for interested enthusiasts.
- adrian_b 3y agoThe AMD documentation consists mostly of very laconic descriptions of the (hundreds or thousands of) registers and of their bit fields. There is almost no explanation about how they are intended to be used and about the detailed microarchitecture of their GPUs. For that, the best remains to read the source code of their Linux drivers, though even that is not always as informative as it could be, as some of the C code may have been automatically generated from some other form used internally by AMD. The Intel documentation is much more complete. Nevertheless, AMD has promised recently in several occasions that they will publish in the near future additional GPU documentation and additional open-source parts of their GPU drivers, so hopefully there will be a time when the quality of their documentation will match again that of Intel, like it did until around 2000.
- xeonmc 3y agoSomewhat relevant, from 2018: [The Thirty Million Line Problem - Casey Muratori](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZRE7HIO3vk)