Jonathan Blow

Know what’s extremely off-putting? Learned helplessness. Don’t be helpless.

I already mentioned one of the two plans to a new driver equilibrium I think have a smidge of hope, the other being try to piggy-back off of WebGPU momentum and then work down unifying drivers from there. I'm interested in how you think we might get there. What's your plan?

There are many possibilities. One is, build the thing. Build a pretend instruction set that is at a low level such that it would be targetable by any high-level language. Do a pass for LLVM that outputs to this. Then do all the gross garbage that up-translates this to

all the various shading languages. In the short term this is just another sucky shader language, but at least now it's at the right level of abstraction, so someone can do driver-level support in Linux, for example, then continue from there.

Intel are doing close to this. It's hard to see through the fog of uncertainty, but OneAPI is groping toward that goal. It's a bunch of tools and languages and so on with interop as the focus. Of course it's Yet More Standards in the short term. We'll see where it leads.

An obvious tensions is between what Jon wants which is a super low level "assembly" that works on every GPU, and Intel's 50 years of experience doing this on CPUs where it's a gigantic pain in the arse.

It's a giant pain, that actually fucking works. I am able to write programs to that ISA and have high confidence that they will function correctly. I cannot say the same about Intel's fucking graphics drivers. So let's admit that some things work and some things do not.

I agree that you are happy to make it my problem.