So it appears that somebody dumped the export list of the Mantle API DLL, presumably from the BF4 update. Here you go.

MANTLE64.DLL

grInitAndEnumerateGpus
grGetGpuInfo
grCreateDevice
grDestroyDevice
grGetExtensionSupport
grGetDeviceQueue
grQueueSubmit
grQueueWaitIdle
grDeviceWaitIdle
grGetMemoryHeapCount
grGetMemoryHeapInfo
grAllocMemory
grFreeMemory
grMapMemory
grUnmapMemory
grGetMultiGpuCompatibility
grOpenSharedQueueSemaphore
grOpenPeerImage
grDestroyObject
grGetObjectInfo
grBindObjectMemory
grCreateFence
grGetFenceStatus
grCreateQueueSemaphore
grSignalQueueSemaphore
grWaitQueueSemaphore
grCreateEvent
grGetEventStatus
grResetEvent
grCreateQueryPool
grGetQueryPoolResults
grGetFormatInfo
grCreateImage
grGetImageSubresourceInfo
grCreateImageView
grCreateColorTargetView
grCreateDepthStencilView
grCreateShader
grCreateGraphicsPipeline
grCreateComputePipeline
grStorePipeline
grLoadPipeline
grCreateSampler
grCreateDescriptorSet
grBeginDescriptorSetUpdate
grEndDescriptorSetUpdate
grAttachSamplerDescriptors
grAttachImageViewDescriptors
grAttachMemoryViewDescriptors
grClearDescriptorSetSlots
grCreateViewportState
grCreateRasterState
grCreateMsaaState
grCreateColorBlendState
grCreateDepthStencilState
grCreateCommandBuffer
grBeginCommandBuffer
grEndCommandBuffer
grResetCommandBuffer
grCmdBindPipeline
grCmdBindStateObject
grCmdBindDescriptorSet
grCmdBindIndexData
grCmdBindTargets
grCmdPrepareMemoryRegions
grCmdPrepareImages
grCmdDraw
grCmdDrawIndexed
grCmdDrawIndirect
grCmdDispatch
grCmdDispatchIndirect
grCmdCopyMemory
grCmdCopyImage
grCmdCopyMemoryToImage
grCmdCopyImageToMemory
grCmdClearColorImage
grCmdClearDepthStencil
grCmdSetEvent
grCmdBeginQuery
grCmdEndQuery
grCmdResetQueryPool
grCmdWriteTimestamp
grCmdInitAtomicCounters
grCmdLoadAtomicCounters
grCmdSaveAtomicCounters
grDbgSetValidationLevel
grDbgRegisterMsgCallback
grDbgSetObjectTag
grDbgSetGlobalOption
grWsiWinGetDisplays
grWsiWinGetDisplayModeList
grWsiWinTakeFullscreenOwnership
grWsiWinReleaseFullscreenOwnership
grWsiWinCreatePresentableImage
grWsiWinQueuePresent

MANTLEAXL64.DLL

grUpdateBorderColorPalette
grCmdBindBorderColorPalette
grCreateAdvancedMsaaState
grCreateFmaskImageView
grQueueDelay
grCreateBorderColorPalette

nice does not seem very complicated

With the huge performance gains I see in Star Swarm & Battlefield 4 and the export list posted above, I'm really excited to have a go with Mantle myself. Does anybody have a clue if and when a Mantle SDK will be released?

With the huge performance gains I see in Star Swarm & Battlefield 4 and the export list posted above, I'm really excited to have a go with Mantle myself. Does anybody have a clue if and when a Mantle SDK will be released?

According to Nick Thibieroz the public SDK is planned for later this year. I would suspect that they will want to work closely with early adopters in order to address QA concerns from having a new driver model, and also exposing details to application developers.

You can always get in touch with AMD's developer relations guys, or get your company to do so. I've an indie-dev friend who's gotten access to new APIs and free hardware samples just through networking and being interested

I'm just wondering what are the chances of wide scale adoption? So far, there's only 3 game engines that will use Mantle. What about Unreal, Glacier, CryEngine, etc.?

In a lot of ways, the big engines are almost the new OpenGL/Direct3D -- I daresay most licensees never touch the guts of the rendering systems. Combine that with the fact that Mantle--although it is not any of the new-generation console APIs--has a programming model that is very much inline with those (bindless resources, manual memory management, manual threading, less redundant security) APIs, and the fact that all popular engines support consoles, Mantle will become widely supported.

On top of that, mantle requires a fairly modern take on what a GPU is, but not one that's specific to AMD -- nVidia and Intel should both be able to implement mantle-ready drivers and see the same kinds of performance gains. GPU architecture is much more converged across vendors now than ever before -- It used to be the case that nVidia and then-ATI GPUs were as different from one another as x86 and PowerPC, but now they're much closer on that spectrum to the differences between intel and AMD x64 processors (of course they have a different internal ISA and arrangement of silicon, but logically they can be treated in much he same way without requiring as thick a layer of abstraction as before). The only modern GPUs that still do things in fundamentally different ways are the kinds of GPUs you find in smartphones and tablets.

Really, Mantle isn't so much an AMD power-play as it is a casting off of those thicker abstractions that evolved to inclusively support hardware that looks nothing like what we have today, and to support programming models and OS driver-models that we'd rather not continue to suffer under.

There was a rumor to the effect that D3D 11.x would be the last in the line of what we know as D3D today, and that there might be some blue-sky thinking going on within Microsoft that would end in a re-imagined 3D API very much like Mantle. High-end, high-profile engine developers have been vocal for quite some time about wanting a more console-like API on the PC--Mantle is one response to that (It's not just something that AMD is pushing of their own accord), and this blue-sky project would be another. Its entirely possible that nVidia may have some still-unknown project of their own, but they'd probably be better off falling in line now since they're not the first mover.