>Some people say that the AmigaOne will support the
>Radeon 9100 which is a rebadged(?) 8500. Yet, if you >go to some sites they are only bundling the LE version
>of the 8500.
Like we've said before, we will release a list of officially supported cards when the drivers are ready. You can see what we have in mind to start with by looking at our web store's AmigaOne configuration options. This is not intended to be an all-inclusive list, merely what will be available from us in particular, but we at this time cannot support the newer 9xxx models, as ATI has not yet released documentation on the newest Radeon chip versions. We will not officially support chips we have no documentation for, but if things happen to work anyway, that's cool. If something is flaky with the newest version but fine for older ones, we cannot properly address and fix such flakyness in chips we do not have proper documentation for. We may try, but we do not promise to try and may not, and if we do it will not be guaranteed and will not be officially supported, and anyone going against our recommendation and using 9xxx models do so at their own risk, until such time we are able to properly support them. When we are able to properly support these cards, we will let you folks know this, but until you see an announcement directly from us, please assume we still recommend against.
Now, yes, someone has said that the 9100 model in particular is a rebadged 8500. We don't know this person, and will get this rumor verified one way or another. Until then, the official answer is "no". We'll let you know if and when this official answer may change, or if the "no" gets reinforced. If the 9100 turns out to be something other than a rebadged 8500, the reinforced "no" answer may change in the future as new documentation becomes available, but not until then.
Also remember, for you people looking forward to 3D functions, while 2D may possibly (but not supported) work fine (or may not), the 3D Radeon functionality documentation is available for the older cards, but not yet for the 9500/9700. So even if 2D works, 9500/9700 users would have a longer wait for 3D support, as that has had vast changes in the new chips, and I would not expect any 8500 3D driver to work by coincidence nearly as well as a 2D driver might (or might not).
And I'd also like to mention that we've been asked why we cannot just use Linux drivers as documentation. There are a few issues here. Is Linux driver source code available for everything we need? No. The Linux drivers assume an x86 platform, and the card gets inited at power-on/POST by the x86 motherboard BIOS, not by the Linux driver. While AmigaOne's PPCboot BIOS should take care of this power-on/POST init stuff, classic Amigas don't have this, so Prometheus/Mediator versions of Radeon drivers need to do have this in the driver, and the only documentation here is what we get from ATI. (I left Grex off that list, not because it does init stuff for us, but because we have zero documentation for this PCI bus board and cannot support it at all. We tried, but DCE gave us invalid emai address to Frank Mariak who is in charge of the Grex DDK, and later email attempts to Frank with a valid email never got replied to at all. See also the recent Grex petition thread on ann.lu about IP issues in the way of them being able to share documentation, though it would have been nice if they had at least told us that rather than completely ignored our requests)
When Hyperion work on the 3D driver, not all features of the Radeon are in the Linux open-source code. Certain features, particularly texture and lighting for example, are kept proprietary, so any openly available Linux source here is not completely helpful.
And finally, what license is the Linux driver source code released under? I haven't seen what license they use. I'd hate to end up in a situation where looking at Linux driver source obligates us to release our source, conflicting withour contract with ATI which specifically forbids releasing source to anyone outside of our NDA, and we become unable to release the drivers at all.
But as I mentioned above, with Linux driver source lacking some things we need, I don't see much point in going outside the docs ATI gave us, and using Linux source as our documentation really isn't that suitable when we want to guarantee we can properly support a particular Radeon model. The Linux driver source is not comprehensive to the new Radeon version features, so we cannot comprehensively guarantee we can make everything work for the new cards by simply using Linux source. We need the complete documentation from ATI to fill in the gaps before we can make any guarantees or officially support these new cards.
Did I miss anything?
