A stable instruction set would be nice.
But hi, if I spent $10,000 on a piece of hardware, let me program the metal, thanks.
But hi, if I spent $10,000 on a piece of hardware, let me program the metal, thanks.
I can't compare it to changes I've seen in CPU architecture since then. Maybe like: Compare the NES with its 6502 and per-cartridge mappers vs. a IBM 386 PC. Now repeat that shift 2 or 3 more times.
How many times since we got shaders? And when exactly? I bet each change takes longer to come than the last. I mean, GPUs are increasingly general purpose nowadays. Sure they're optimised to specific kinds of embarrassingly parallel problems, but as more and more of their capabilities move out of the fixed pipeline to shaders, the need to change lessens.
In the GeForce3 era, the registers got complicated enough they resembled tiny "pixel shaders", but under the hood it was still a small struct held in registers. Vertex shaders were 1 to 128 asm instructions executed strictly linearly.
In the G80 era we got "general purpose shaders." But, they still depend heavily on the fix function pipeline for their dispatch/scheduling and I/O.
These days, everything is basically a dressed-up compute shader. The shared-memory SRAM is front-and-center in your attention. Dispatch and scheduling are manual and complicated. GPUs are transitioning into tensor evaluators.
So, maybe today we can start considering talking about planning committee meetings about stability. But, what I've observed is that this has been a request for a few decades now. And, in hindsight it would not have worked out in the past. Moving forward, maybe it would work out OK today for a while. But, I don't see the rate of change in GPUs slowing down any time soon. Wouldn't be surprised if we're racing towards some Cerebras + Tensor Cores + FPGA near future.