firmware = simple, but not simpler than required to do a good enough job, hardware programming interface on complex chips. You need software jingle room to fix

firmware = simple, but not simpler than required to do a good enough job, hardware programming interface on complex chips. You need software jingle room to fix things on complex chips, which is very true for SOC and GPU and now CPU, hence one of the main reasons for firwmare to be. But going beyond that sole purpose of presenting a hardware programming interface is a slippy slop, for instance the CPU user digital jails. Many simpler chips can expose a hardware programming interface which does not require a firmware though. I have not read on what is the nvidia hardware programming interface is since now we have open source code, but rumors say it is orders of magnitude simpler than for AMD GPUs (which is still kind of a mess).