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 need to do that to sell their hardware so why would they do that? On the other hand, they have strong incentives to not give you that level of access and information. The only way this will change is by having some disruption by way of a competitor who sells hardware with that feature as being a major reason why it takes off.
Or we could regulate. One hammer I'm tempted to use is to simply forbid sales and importation of hardware made by companies that also distribute software. That way the only way to sell you hardware is to make sure its interfaces are both simple and thoroughly documented.
We could possibly make an exception for open source software, or only forbid the distribution of the relevant drivers, or limit the applicability of that law to specific hardware: hard drives, mice, printers, web cams... or GPUs.
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.
surajrmal · · focus · HN ↗
loup-vaillant · · focus · HN ↗
We could possibly make an exception for open source software, or only forbid the distribution of the relevant drivers, or limit the applicability of that law to specific hardware: hard drives, mice, printers, web cams... or GPUs.
Anyway, that should be disruption enough.