It’s Time to Open Up the GPU

> but if GPUOpen is to have any substance at all it's obvious that they're going to actually do some of that.

I don't think they'll do it. I think they're going to shoot for SPIR-V being close enough that SPIR-V compilers generate code good enough that the internal compilers can gen good ISA code.

> They're not overhauling the ISA every year.

They aren't, but the changes rev to rev are more significant than you'd expect. On top of that, the big bumps are significant, such as Fermi to Kepler or Northern Islands to Southern Islands (or whatever). These are not backwards compatible with each other, unlike Intel x86 ISA.

Bonus edit: Also...I'd speculate that some IHVs would rather not expose their IL-to-ISA compiler. Not because of 'secret sauce'. But because they aren't that good, and would rather have the OSS community start fresh and do a better job.

I feel a rant on software patents coming on.

I've been in groups that have been on the receiving end of patent lawsuits twice. Both times the patents were transparently invalid.

The first time involves my dorm at MIT. Back before I arrived there some enterprising student had hooked up our laundry machines to the internet so we could all find out when there was a free one and when our laundry was done. The internet at large got wind of this and sadly the servers were Slashdotted in both senses of the word. Shortly after the idea appeared on Slashdot some enterprising entrepreneur filed for a patent on the idea of hooking laundry machines up to the internet and was granted it. Several years later our dorm, through MIT, was sued for patent infringement. Luckily the MIT administration had spines so they didn't get anywhere. But the patent is still in force and other universities still have to pay millions of dollars to this group to hook their laundry machines up to the internet.

The second time involved the first company I worked for out of grad school, a sensors consultancy. They had some ideas about structural health monitoring using piezoelectrics and sent their designs off to another company to be fabbed. They filed for patents on their ideas and shortly after the fab house filed for patents on those same ideas. They mostly got their patents but for some reason the fab house got one in first despite filing later causing their patent application to be denied. Then the fab house sued them and somewhere in the process there were layoffs and I lost my job.

Just because something is patented doesn't mean that it is original and non-obvious. The Patent Office doesn't actually have enough resources to do the job that has been set out for it. The number of patent applications being submitted has increased exponentially over the years but the USPO staff hasn't. You might ask why they just don't fail to grant a patent until they've examined it carefully. Well, they used to do that but the backlog got big and Congress In Its Wisdom passed a law saying that they couldn't have a backlog. You might ask why they don't raise filing fees and use the money to hire more workers. Well, Congress In Its Wisdom has decided what the fees are and has also decided that the USPO can't keep all the money it collects since there are needy people in many other Congressional districts. So that's where we are.

It would not surprise me in the least if many NVidia and AMD patents cover the same ideas in different language. But just because AMD happens to have a patent on the technique they're using doesn't mean that NVidia can't sue them with their own patent on that same technique. Legally patents have a presumption validity behind them so courts are bound to assume the USPO gave them the sort of inspection the USPO is unable except in certain complicated cases.

Side question: does anyone have links on some power bounds for what the Bitcoin network is currently consuming?

Understand it would be a very rough estimate, but seems like it would be possible to arrive at some kind of number given electricity prices as a ceiling and state of the art efficiency as a floor.

Curious on what the magnitude is in relation to other things...

Yea, reminds me of the original Altair and IBM PC and how both was cloned with profit margins on the boxes falling over time. Unfortunately I think ANSI/ISO and other standard committees was probably poorly suited to setting standards in this area. The right way back then would probably be to design a reference system and release schematics and other design information.

> The right way back then would probably be to design a reference system and release schematics and other design information.

The interesting choice is to release a fully open design with a solid implementation for your own hardware but also one for the competitor's hardware that meets every part of the spec but you've spent no effort to optimize.

Then everyone starts with your API because it gives support for the largest variety of hardware out of the gate and only supports the competing proprietary API if the project has the resources and the performance difference can justify it.

Which puts the competing hardware vendor in a tough spot. Either they do the work to optimize the open API implementation for their hardware, essentially guaranteeing that the open API wins, or they don't and users of software that supports only the open API start to avoid their hardware.