[gentoo-user] Mantle Open source GPU engine

[James <wireless@tampabay.rr.com>]

Howdy one and all,

Well I heard about about AMD's push, referred to as Mantle
to unseat DirectX as the defacto gaming platform (yawn)...


But recently, an egg_head mathematician that irritates me
from time to time, called me in the middle of the night.
He, being an eceptionally bright and difficult humnoid; would 
not shut up at what AMD is doing.

Finally it seems that an open source, raw hardware access
API is going to allow truely unfettered access to the
computational blocks inside of a GPU. (ok now I was awake).

Upon googing this am, I do see quite a buzz, particularly
since all Nvidia would have to do, is decide to implement
the open source -- open standard access to the bare metal
of the GPU. This should not be taken likely as it is akin 
to all of the FPGA hardware folks giving away the billions
of dollars in IP, software and integration tools that make
building a custom processor, possible. Those tools are locked
away, due to expense and the business approach of hardware
vendors asking for money each time they reveal the tricks,
trade secrets and heuritical methods to build low level components.

What this means is that MANTLE is a game changer and opens
up "bare metal access" to multitudes of ordinary computational
 and recreatioal computer weenies....(whoa Pee!)


If this is true, it is a GAME CHANGERS (could not resist the pun).


So:
A. it is time for me to dig into this issue.
B. Are any of the folks on this list working to get
Mantle support available on Gentoo?
C. Anyone tested one of the "Hawaii" radeon cards?
D. Anyone working on running SteamOS virtualize on (gentoo) linux?


as always, your thoughts are most welcome

James

[1]
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2049369/amd-nvidia-ramp-up-linux-driver-support-after-valves-steamos-announcement.html

[2] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-mantle-api-gcn-battlefield-4,24418.html