ATI "microcode"

[Richard M Stallman]

Someone said:

    > This is microcode for AMD video cards which is required in order to
    > have 2D/3D acceleration with otherwise free drivers.

Does this mean that the cards do work without this microcode,
but without acceleration?

Do we have any information about the processor which runs this code?
What kind is it?

    I'm talking with the AMD project manager for that card's drivers. This
    microcode runs a "command processor", a kind of hardware parser for data
    packages, that as I can tell from that conversations, may have something
    to do with drm.

I wonder if they would cooperate with releasing a free version sans
DRM support.