Okay, so, GPUs are taking one more step towards being general purpose massively parallel machines. That's cool.
What would be even cooler though would be for GPU vendors to start giving us the user manual. An I mean the real user manual, that explains how to use their piece of metal when all you have is that piece of metal. That means a precise description of the wire protocols, the data format of the buffers we send to & get from the GPU, the ISA of the cores we have access to, the relevant performance characteristics…
In other words, enough information to write a state-of-the-art driver for any OS. That would be cool.
They don't release it because exposing a stable instruction set would kill their ability to quickly iterate, to release silicon with bugs that can be papered over with software fixes, as fixing bugs in chips is very expensive in terms of time to market, and undoubtedly to charge more for what looks like a hardware feature but actually is a software feature.
It's been this way for 25 years and I don't see it changing.
loup-vaillant · · focus · HN ↗
What would be even cooler though would be for GPU vendors to start giving us the user manual. An I mean the real user manual, that explains how to use their piece of metal when all you have is that piece of metal. That means a precise description of the wire protocols, the data format of the buffers we send to & get from the GPU, the ISA of the cores we have access to, the relevant performance characteristics…
In other words, enough information to write a state-of-the-art driver for any OS. That would be cool.
floil · · focus · HN ↗
It's been this way for 25 years and I don't see it changing.
PhunkyPhil · · focus · HN ↗