"esp. in things like the differing perspectives of IHVs vs. ISVs”
That does not surprise me. The IHVs used to write drivers with tens of layers of code, and now only have to write the lowest-level layers. That could mean a significant cost reduction for them, but that code still would have to be written and maintained.
The ISVs, on the other hand, will have to write those intermediate layers, possibly multiple times for different target requirements (speed vs display quality, for example; every single application could have custom-tuned upper layers), and (almost) for every single hardware revision (that may mean a growing market, which would be good for them, if they can find the engineers to take it)
ISVs also may have concerns that a new competitor will spring up to try and take this new territory (for example, engineers who now write the upper levels of OpenGL drivers for a hardware manufacturer might start a new company)
I’m not sure the IHVs should be completely happy, though. Third parties who will try to write those intermediate layers will need a very good understanding of what the hardware actually does, and that may leak what they consider competitive information (it may give competitors hints as to how to make their hardware faster, or it may give them more information to sue them for patent breaches for). Because of that, I would not be surprised if a lot of this information would be ‘given’ to ISVs under NDA. That would be bad for those wanting to write open source drivers.
That does not surprise me. The IHVs used to write drivers with tens of layers of code, and now only have to write the lowest-level layers. That could mean a significant cost reduction for them, but that code still would have to be written and maintained.
The ISVs, on the other hand, will have to write those intermediate layers, possibly multiple times for different target requirements (speed vs display quality, for example; every single application could have custom-tuned upper layers), and (almost) for every single hardware revision (that may mean a growing market, which would be good for them, if they can find the engineers to take it)
ISVs also may have concerns that a new competitor will spring up to try and take this new territory (for example, engineers who now write the upper levels of OpenGL drivers for a hardware manufacturer might start a new company)
I’m not sure the IHVs should be completely happy, though. Third parties who will try to write those intermediate layers will need a very good understanding of what the hardware actually does, and that may leak what they consider competitive information (it may give competitors hints as to how to make their hardware faster, or it may give them more information to sue them for patent breaches for). Because of that, I would not be surprised if a lot of this information would be ‘given’ to ISVs under NDA. That would be bad for those wanting to write open source drivers.