From what I gather, often times their specs have other companies' IP
buried within them. For example, ATi and their OEMs release a series of cards called "All-In-Wonder" with each new chip. These AIW cards have a ton of extras on them like TV-tuners, hardware media decoders, the works. So for people looking to by a single card to perform multiple tasks rather than buying a Radeon, DXR3, tv tuner, etc, this is a good deal. However, those extras such the TV tuner and media decoder chips aren't necessarily ATi's own design. And for some reason, ATi can't release specs on everything *but* the proprietary chips (And some industry "analysts" call the GPL viral!).
But then again, I have no way of verifying this, and it's a discussion for another BBS :)
On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Terry Blunt wrote:
"Hendricks David W." dwh@lanl.gov wrote:
We don't need to with nVidia, we can run their VGA BIOS using testbios.
Though in the perfect world, they'd be more forthcoming with specs so that someone can make an LB port for their nForce boards.
On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Carlos Silva wrote:
Really nice news... i'll keep dreaming that nvidia will do the same.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I can never understand hardware manufacturers being cagey about their specs. I would have thought it would save them a lot of hassle if they *didn't* have to write drivers themselves. If they made the information available with suggestions and worked examples, the software industry would do it all for them.
To forestall one argument, I really don't see anyone being able to reverse engineer the *hardware* from the overall specs.