[sliverstorm]

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.

Except for the word "ISA", this sounds an awful lot like OpenGL, OpenCL, & Direct3D.

Which makes sense. You don't run a software binary on a GPU, so why does it need its own standard ISA? A GPU crunches data. The CPU feeds the GPU data. So we use APIs. You could make the GPU more like a CPU at the cost of graphics performance. Or you could integrate a CPU to the GPU, whose job is to run software and keep the GPU fed. But that sounds an awful lot like an APU.

Basically what I'm saying is a GPU is more like a network adapter- it is just fed data- and network adapters don't have their own ISA either! They do have binary blobs, but that is firmware.