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.
> exposing a stable instruction set would kill their ability to quickly iterate
I believe the need to quickly iterate dropped significantly since we got shaders. I would bet in fact there was few such iterations in the last 10 years. Crazy increases in computing power of course, but big breaking changes in the actual ISA? I'd be surprised.
> to release silicon with bugs that can be papered over with software fixes
Yeah that's actually one of my goals. Only ship stuff that works on pain of embarrassment and prohibitive recall costs. It's crazy hard. It's how CPUs are shipped.
> and undoubtedly to charge more for what looks like a hardware feature but actually is a software feature.
Again, that's good. Such pricing tactics are scummy, I want to end them.
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Now of course, those reasons you cited are reasons for the vendor not to do what I'm pretty sure is very good for the consumer. I propose we force them. We could start small. Mice and keyboards first. Then printers. Then webcams, wifi modules... until we get to GPUs themselves.
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.
loup-vaillant · · focus · HN ↗
I believe the need to quickly iterate dropped significantly since we got shaders. I would bet in fact there was few such iterations in the last 10 years. Crazy increases in computing power of course, but big breaking changes in the actual ISA? I'd be surprised.
> to release silicon with bugs that can be papered over with software fixes
Yeah that's actually one of my goals. Only ship stuff that works on pain of embarrassment and prohibitive recall costs. It's crazy hard. It's how CPUs are shipped.
> and undoubtedly to charge more for what looks like a hardware feature but actually is a software feature.
Again, that's good. Such pricing tactics are scummy, I want to end them.
---
Now of course, those reasons you cited are reasons for the vendor not to do what I'm pretty sure is very good for the consumer. I propose we force them. We could start small. Mice and keyboards first. Then printers. Then webcams, wifi modules... until we get to GPUs themselves.