> We don't have OpenGL, we have "this OpenGL works on nVidia, this other one works on ATI, this one works on iOS, or sometimes it doesn't work anywhere even though it might be officially allowed"

But this is just the shortfall failure to be standards compliant. We have multiple ARM implementations in CPU space, we have two vendors x86 CPUs, we have all kinds of wireless cards, but assembly on one ARM core better run on another, your x86 binary better run on ARM or Intel chips unless you use vendor specific extensions, and your wireless radio better process inbound data properly regardless of the sender.

I think the real problem is that in the massively parallel pipeline architecture space (aka, gpus, but they are more than just graphics processors anymore) is that they aren't treated like proper programmable computers. What we should have are compilers to build ASM binaries for each architecture, and sane ISAs.

That would mean in the present tense you would need Intel: preSB, SB, IVB, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, etc compilers. I've never read their ISA documentation, so I don't know which of these have common core so that you could treat it like a CPU - ie, base instruction set with extensions like SSE or NEON. I do imagine though if we weren't working at such an absurdly high level, we would see graphics hardware conform to the same model as CPUs - common ISA, with multiple implementations.

I guess the problem there is that the way all modern ISAs are handled is ridiculous and stupid. Intel "owns" x86, ARM "owns" itself, etc. The reason we don't have reasonable CPU competition is that you don't just compete in hardware implementation, you either need to pay extortion to use what is effectively the same API - the same ISA - and that is one of the strengths of the graphics industry. The effective ISA that software is built against is predominantly open (most GPU code is openGL, despite how many directX games there are). We can see the difference - very little hardware runs DirectX because they have to pay MS the privilege to support it, and then it isn't even a standard at all so you can't use it on anything but Windows. It is congruent with proprietary ISAs for cpus.

An example of a non-proprietary ISA is SPARC. I've never really looked into how good an ISA it actually is, but it is royalty free unless you want to use the branding - you can implement your own SPARC cpus without paying jack, the way it should be.

So like I said, what we really need is a common open ISA for hardware graphics accelerators to implement, and then independently develop extensions for that can be proposed and adopted into the mainstream standard. And if that standard ever becomes overly bloated, any vendor can develop their own newer base to handle newer paradigms or fix bloat, the same way we see programming languages go.

If I didn't have to figure out how to eat or didn't have another dozen things I'd want to do, I'd definitely want to see what I could manage writing a binary compiler for the SI ISA from AMD and seeing how performant you could make some other high level graphics language with compiled binaries. That is kind of what they did with Mantle, but their continued showing of not making any effort to open that language up to standardization or even just publishing it at all shows that it certainly won't be the answer.