Unfortunately, from my understanding, hardware innovation seems to be on a trajectory whereby it is exactly going toward the case that most functionality is "soft" and thereby fundamental changes can be wrought through microcode. Just look at Nvidia's use of FALCON's. Hardware manufacturers seemingly WANT to be able to use the same piece of hardware for different jobs, and having blobs tooled to reconfigure it is the way to go.

My biggest problem is that figuring this state of affairs out is like pulling teeth.

That’s the thing about microcoded machines: they’re fundamentally flexible. Even so, to be honest I don’t care too much about that. What I really want is a reliable, stable enough interface to the hardware.

Besides, there are other ways to get that flexibility. CPUs for instance have a very flexible ISA: even if they’re set in stone, we can use them for pretty much anything, the only real limitation being performance.

Now when I think about it, even if firmware can significantly change the functionality of a chip, I don’t care too much of it being proprietary. Not more than I care about fixed hardware being proprietary. It’s okay for a piece of hardware to have 3 or 10 different configurations, as long as (i) I can trust that each configuration works as advertised, and (ii) the ISA I got from each configuration is publicly documented.

There’s a practical reason for this wish: hardware is typically orders of magnitude more reliable than software. That’s mostly because buggy software is easily updated, while flawed hardware is often impossible to sell. CPU bugs do happen, but they’re sufficiently few and far between that when my programs behave unexpectedly, I can safely assume it’s the software’s fault.

I don’t want drivers any more, I want the hardware’s manual. https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0031