Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are compilers. What open source CPU is there?
Uh... the GPU drivers we're talking about in this subthread are precisely "compilers" for the shader architecture (and configuration generators for the texture units and framebuffer layouts, etc...). In fact for architectures other than NVIDIA's the hardware-facing part of the linux driver already is open source. The only secrets left are the bits responsible for turning OpenGL (or Vulkan now, I guess) calls into pro…
Wouldn't it be fair to say that GPU architectures (at least thus far) tend to change a helluva faster than CPU ones?
I can think of AMD adopting and then ditching VLIW for one.