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Howdy one and all, |
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Well I heard about about AMD's push, referred to as Mantle |
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to unseat DirectX as the defacto gaming platform (yawn)... |
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But recently, an egg_head mathematician that irritates me |
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from time to time, called me in the middle of the night. |
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He, being an eceptionally bright and difficult humnoid; would |
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not shut up at what AMD is doing. |
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Finally it seems that an open source, raw hardware access |
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API is going to allow truely unfettered access to the |
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computational blocks inside of a GPU. (ok now I was awake). |
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Upon googing this am, I do see quite a buzz, particularly |
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since all Nvidia would have to do, is decide to implement |
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the open source -- open standard access to the bare metal |
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of the GPU. This should not be taken likely as it is akin |
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to all of the FPGA hardware folks giving away the billions |
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of dollars in IP, software and integration tools that make |
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building a custom processor, possible. Those tools are locked |
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away, due to expense and the business approach of hardware |
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vendors asking for money each time they reveal the tricks, |
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trade secrets and heuritical methods to build low level components. |
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What this means is that MANTLE is a game changer and opens |
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up "bare metal access" to multitudes of ordinary computational |
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and recreatioal computer weenies....(whoa Pee!) |
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If this is true, it is a GAME CHANGERS (could not resist the pun). |
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So: |
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A. it is time for me to dig into this issue. |
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B. Are any of the folks on this list working to get |
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Mantle support available on Gentoo? |
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C. Anyone tested one of the "Hawaii" radeon cards? |
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D. Anyone working on running SteamOS virtualize on (gentoo) linux? |
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as always, your thoughts are most welcome |
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James |
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[1] |
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http://www.pcworld.com/article/2049369/amd-nvidia-ramp-up-linux-driver-support-after-valves-steamos-announcement.html |
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[2] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-mantle-api-gcn-battlefield-4,24418.html |