AMD's driver is in your kernel, all the userspace is on GitHub. The ISA is documented. It's entirely possible to treat the ASICs as mass market subsidized floating point machines and run your own code on them.

Modulo firmware. I'm vaguely on the path to working out what's going on there. Changing that without talking to the hardware guys in real time might be rather difficult even with the code available though.

I haven't found the firmware source code yet - digging through confluence and perforce tries my patience and I'm supposed to be working on llvm - but I hear it's written in assembly, where one of the hurdles to open sourcing it is the assembler is proprietary. I suspect there's some common information shared with the hardware description language (tcl and verilog or whatever they're using). To the extent that turns out to be true, it'll be immune to C style undefined behaviour, but I wouldn't bet on it being free from buffer overflows.

That said, if you're on the inside, like I am, and you talk to people at AMD (just got off two separate back to back calls with them), rest assured, they are dedicated to making this stuff work.

Part of that is to build a developer flywheel by making their top end hardware available to end users. That's where my company Hot Aisle comes into play. Something that wasn't available before outside of the HPC markets, is now going to be made available.

This is peak comedy

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

This is exactly the void I'm trying to fill.