[pmarreck]

If that's the case, then why does the GPU portion have to be reverse-engineered for Asahi Linux? Of course I knew about the ARM portion, there are lots of ARM chips licensed to by ARM Holdings, it's not exactly a secret. But the "apple silicon" chip in its entirety, is not completely documented.

[kbolino]

Are any competitive GPU architectures any better? I don't think nVidia, AMD, Intel, nor PowerVR openly publish the internals of their graphics products either.

[wmf]

AMD and Intel publish detailed GPU documentation.

[kbolino]

Ok, good to know. To wit, I found the following:

AMD: https://gpuopen.com/amd-gpu-architecture-programming-documen...

Intel: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/graphics-for-li...

[saagarjha]

The API for programming the GPU is Metal.

[15155]

Peripherals are not the ISA or CPU architecture: they are usually made by numerous parties.

[why_only_15]

Apple has designed their own GPUs since they stopped using PowerVR with A11

[15155]

What does that have to do with ARM64 assembly? The ISA and CPU architecture are orthogonal to all peripherals.

These peripherals are accessed with memory-mapped IO using the same instructions any other program uses.

Documentation about ARM64 assembly shouldn't and doesn't contain specific peripheral access info. ISA docs contain info common to all CPUs implementing the spec.