Ronald G Minnich writes:
> AMD's Open Source Relations people tell me I can not currently release the
> 5 lines of C that would make your K7SEM work well. They are trying to
> figure out if they will EVER allow us to release this code. I am trying to
> put together a list of companies to get in touch with AMD to try to get
> this resolved. They are committed to getting us an answer within 30 days.
> They are trying as hard as they can, but they can not make any guarantees.
this is realy sad. AMD costs tiwice cheaper than PIII and it's more faster.
SiS's chipset is alwo low in cost. If we are speaking about clusters,
there's nothing more cost/effective than AMD, losing it is just
unacceptable!
>
> There are three possible ways out of this.
> 1) AMD lets us release that code. For the record, I have spoken to a CPU
> designer at AMD about this. He tells me that this material should never
> have been NDA in the first place. He was actually surprised that
> it was under NDA. It is essentially NDA by accident.
> 2) Some bright fellow reverse engineers a BIOS (it would be VERY early in
> startup ...) and tells us how to turn the chip on. Denis Dowling, where
> are you now :-)
but if we reverse-engineer it , we still wouldn't be allowed to put it in a
source code, I'm right? If so, reversing stuff that we already know would be
very easy....
> 3) We all give up on AMD and use Intel only. In which case
> all of us who spent money on K7 hardware are screwed, and all the
> companies that put man-hours into K7/LinuxBIOS are screwed too. This
> would be very unfortunate. I do like these K7s. But at this point
> we have had to suspend all our K7 projects. I am really glad I didn't
> buy the real big AMD cluster I was planning on getting ...
>
this is horrible........ I will not leave AMD, I will keep going on it... I
don't care about this NDA stupidity, if the reverse engineering will be
needed, I'll do it.
Nikolai
