Radeon DRI for FireGL T2

[Ryan Underwood]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 03:00:37PM -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> that the hardware is still considered relevant.  The R4xx cards are 
> current now however, and by the time such drivers might be completed 
> under proper funding though and get the kinks worked out, a new 
> generation of hardware is likely to be out, and the R300 work will be 2 
> or more generations old.

Of course, it's possible that we might see R300 docs once R4xx becomes
more mainstream... we can wish? :)

> work in a reasonable timeframe.  People who have the level of skill who 
> could pull it off, would probably be hired by a video vendor or other 
> hardware vendor before they completed such a complex task, and would 
> likely not have the time to dedicate to completing the work.

Funny you mention that.  Just the other day I read about a company named
NeoCad who was producing EDA tools in the early 90's.  When Xilinx
FPGAs became more popular, they underwent the painstaking process of
reverse engineering the bitstream format that Xilinx's EDA software
created, so that they could target Xilinx parts with their own EDA
software.  The long and the short of it is that Xilinx bought NeoCad as
a defensive measure.

Nobody since then has managed to figure out the bitstreams that the big
FPGA vendors use, so it's impossible for us to produce free EDA
toolchains (VHDL/Verilog -> netlist -> encrypted bitstream) for them
unless someone else reproduces the effort.  If anyone did such a thing
today (10 years since NeoCad's effort) in the US, they'll either get
hired, bought out, or sued.  My money would be on the latter.

-- 
Ryan Underwood, <nemesis at icequake.net>
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