In search of Radeon HD5770 Documentation

[Lexadrik]

I'm currently in a Computer Architecture class in college for a CS degree. I was asked to select any kind of process to investigate it on deep detail (this is literally going down to transistor/binary level). I made the horrendous mistake of forgetting to take out my video card for this (an ATI Radeon HD5770) And now I am forced to investigate the architecture of the card and its IC's. Is there any way I could access this information? ATI's gives me nothing. I don't even know in full detail how video cards work (only general Integrated Graphics knowledge)

The real issue here is that it is too much information and I don't even know where to begin, worse of all is that this should be done by december.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Eximo]

I'm currently in a Computer Architecture class in college for a CS degree. I was asked to select any kind of process to investigate it on deep detail (this is literally going down to transistor/binary level). I made the horrendous mistake of forgetting to take out my video card for this (an ATI Radeon HD5770) And now I am forced to investigate the architecture of the card and its IC's. Is there any way I could access this information? ATI's gives me nothing. I don't even know in full detail how video cards work (only general Integrated Graphics knowledge)

The real issue here is that it is too much information and I don't even know where to begin, worse of all is that this should be done by december.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5770,2446.html

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2856

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_processing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_HD_5000_Series

And so on...

 

[Lexadrik]

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5770,2446.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2856
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_processing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_HD_5000_Series
And so on...

Thanks for your help, I had already read most of those. I guess the next step is to know if it would be possible to get some schematics to see the physical architecture of the card. Is this information normally available to the public? I can't get ahold of any.

 

[hunter315]

The transistor level is never available, that isn't even patented usually, it is generally deemed a trade secret and kept very protected. You can find block diagrams, but no AMD/nVidia/Intel chip will provide you with real schematics. If you want something that it is feasible to go in depth on look at an ARM core, the big.LITTLE cores have decent documentation and are less elaborate than the full x86 cores of an AMD/Intel chip so a single person can actually figure out what is going on in a reasonable amount of time.