Maybe I'm just naive but the downsides of doing this seem absolutely minimal and the upsides quite large.
Nvidia got around this on their kernel driver by moving most of it to the cards firmware.
> Maybe I'm just naive
Yep.
There are things hidden in the design of very widely used hardware that would make people's heads explode from how out there they are. They are trade secrets, and used to maintain a moat in which people can make money. (As opposed to patents which require publishing publicly).
If you live in open source land you cannot make money from selling software. If there is no special sauce in the hardware you won't be able to make money from that either. Then we can all act surprised that the entire tech landscape is taken over by ads and fails to meaningfully advance.
The dirty open secret in the tech industry is that the special sauce almost always just isn't all that special.
Because AMD didn't actually care about the Linux driver since it didn't make them moeny.
> The dirty open secret in the tech industry is that the special sauce almost always just isn't all that special.
Only among people where that's true. In the computer industry just look at the M series of chips where it's very clear that their direct competitors can't establish why it does what it does.
This is weird Apple fanboy head-in-the-sand thinking. The Mx chips have been dug into plenty and are just good engineering, not magic. AMD's horribly-named "Ryzen AI Max+ 395" chip is definitely moving in the same direction.
Bonus points for ones without ex-Apple employees involved in their design, because maybe those people might know something about it.
Qualcomm have never actually caught up with Apple performance wise since the introduction of Arm64. They had a very nice 32 bit implementation and were completely caught off guard. Prior to their NuVia acquisition their 64 bit efforts were barely improvements on what you can just license from Arm directly, to the point for a while that is all they were.