>I personally prefer the hardware companies making just hardware.
Keeps the incentives pure.
That's self contradictory. Their incentive is to sell more HW and at higher prices using whatever shady practices they can get away with, software or no software. There's nothing pure about that, it's just business. High end chips aren't commodity HW like lawnmowers, they can't function without the right SW.
And this isn't the 90's anymore when Hercules or S3 would only make the silicon, and then system integrators would write the drivers for it which was basically MS-DOS calls to read/write to registers via the PCI bus, by the devs reading a 300 page manual, those days are long gone. Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it to extract the most performance out of it.
>I'm even willing to accept a 20% performance hit for this requirement, should someone bring that up.
I'm also willing to accept arbitrary numbers I make up, as a tradeoff, but the market does not work like that.
> ...by the devs reading a 300 page manual, those days are long gone. Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it...
The 300 page manual would be 3,000 or 30,000 pages long, if modern ARM ISR manuals are any indication. Independent developers could totally write performant drivers if they had the documents, but those manuals do not exist - or if they do, they're proprietary.
> Independent developers could totally write performant drivers if they had the documents,
Surely they could, but at that complexity level, they wouldn't put the necessary amount of effort in it without being payed, and at that point, it's better to hire them.
> but those manuals do not exist - or if they do, they're proprietary.
And there are market-related reasons for that, it's not done because of some arbitrary paranoia. Another important issue is that good documents are hard to write - with regard to driver coding, it's much easier to make a quick call or message the hardware people about some unclear aspect of chip's operation rather than go through the formal process of modifying the official documents. Waiting for external developers to reverse engineer that is slow and leads to serious competitive disadvantages and AMD is an example of it.
> Surely they could, but at that complexity level, they wouldn't put the necessary amount of effort in it without being payed, and at that point, it's better to hire them.
The assumption that no good software will be written without pay is outdated as FOSS disproved it many times over.
> The assumption that no good software will be written without pay is outdated as FOSS disproved it many times over.
I think I made it clear that the necessary effort has to measure up to the complexity level, modification volume and time constraints typical for competitive GPU hardware - hasn't happened without pay for any GPU.
That may change if most of the GPU drivers are moved on-chip, which should have happened earlier but there's a lot of politics involved there too, so who knows.
> nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it to extract the most performance out of it
Let's not go too far here. Reverse engineering and independent development of usable drivers are not impossible, they're 'merely' extremely challenging. Alyssa Rosenzweig in particular had great success reverse engineering the Apple M1 GPU and writing drivers for it, and that was just a few years ago.
The M1 launched in 2019 and FOSS drivers still not on par with MAcOS. You can't stay in business waiting for 6 years for someone else to make drivers for your HW.
This is just a HN fantasy that's not compatible with business of making money. That's why everyone here make money working in SW.
That's self contradictory. Their incentive is to sell more HW and at higher prices using whatever shady practices they can get away with, software or no software. There's nothing pure about that, it's just business. High end chips aren't commodity HW like lawnmowers, they can't function without the right SW.
And this isn't the 90's anymore when Hercules or S3 would only make the silicon, and then system integrators would write the drivers for it which was basically MS-DOS calls to read/write to registers via the PCI bus, by the devs reading a 300 page manual, those days are long gone. Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it to extract the most performance out of it.
>I'm even willing to accept a 20% performance hit for this requirement, should someone bring that up.
I'm also willing to accept arbitrary numbers I make up, as a tradeoff, but the market does not work like that.