[m463]

Isn't this sort of how specialized hardware kind of works?

At some point, hardware (necessarily?) evolves to become optimized to do one thing, and then you have to just treat the driver as an API to the hardware.

Even "simple" things like keyboards and mice are now small computers that run their own code, moreso more complex devices like sound cards and hard drives.

And since graphics card performance seems to be the bottleneck in a lot of computing, it has become super specialized and you just hand off a high-level chunk of data and it does magic in parallel with fast memory and spits it out the hdmi cable.

[AnotherGoodName]

For the keyboard/mouse now being small computers that's been true since the 1970s. Almost all keyboards for a period of about 30 years had an 8048 or 8051 CPU. It's how they serialized the keystrokes. From the model M keyboard through to everything up till the USB era.

[kevin_thibedeau]

In the 70s it would be more common to have an MSI part that ran matrix scanning and spit out parallel bus ASCII. UCs were still spendy.