On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 04:18:53PM +0100, Ilyes Gouta wrote: [...]
There has been pressure to open up their PowerPlay code, but they claim that's a trade secret. :P
What a non-sense... Maybe they're claiming so because of an IP or a patent that they don't want to infringe on. It's plain stupid... PowerPlay is *so* required for laptops. Heat means less chip lifetime, and they have to give that up for the sake of the users. We don't want to have an Nvidia-like fiasco (on the long term) with ATI chips.
Several companies have patents on power saving algorithms, and many more consider the algorithms to be trade secrets. It's the subtleties of exactly when to drop into power management, and when to come back, and possibly predicting demand so that you can ramp up the clock just in time. But that doesn't mean that it's really all that hard to do this. Look at the cpufreq code in the kernel and maybe some of those algorithms will be useful. Of course, the code to actually control the clock and vcore will be completely different. Are the hardware APIs to control this at least open, and it's just the algorithms that they want to protect? If they don't even want to tell you how to make the hardware drop the clock speed and vcore, then that's stupid. If they tell you that and want to protect the "intelligence" part of PowerPlay, so be it. -- Randall -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: radeonhd+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: radeonhd+help@opensuse.org