[Arm-netbook] arm-netbook Digest, Vol 20, Issue 11

[Alec Ari]

> Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 01:46:46 +0000
> From: lkcl luke <luke.leighton at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Arm-netbook] [review] SoC proposal

>  if you've got direct first-hand experience of the types of
> low-level
> operations involved in 3D i could... damn, i could really
> have used
> your help last year: i put out a call on the various mailing
> lists for
> some help in evaluating what was needed at the assembly
> level for 3D
> primitives and got no response.

Actually, the main part I'm most oblivious to is the assembly level 3D instructions themselves. I have a much better understanding of GL/GLSL programming, but when it comes to asm instructions of how the GPU works and low-level decoding / rendering, that's what I don't understand, at least not yet. OpenGL and GLSL have a lot of documentation, tutorials, sample / example code, but all the low-level stuff is covered in the docs for the hardware itself. Might I add that my assembly programming skills are still very poor and would be useless in anything remotely this advanced.

>  it would be really good to be able to get an idea of
> exactly what are
> the inner loops, what's the most intensive operations,
> where's the
> processing power actually needed, to get optimal
> results.  are MIPS
> "on the ball" or is there a better way?
> 
>  l.

I'm not sure if this will help but I have provided some links regarding those inter loops you're talking about, but for RadeonHD hardware.

http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/r600isa.pdf

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/tree/src/cayman_shader.c

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/tree/src/cayman_reg.h

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/src/gallium/drivers/r600/r600_shader.c

I'm sorry I don't have anything more conclusive. This at least gives you a rough idea (hopefully.)

-Alec