I agree that AMD could have done a proprietary intermediate instruction format and with good execution it would have made their users lives easier. But the act

I agree that AMD could have done a proprietary intermediate instruction format and with good execution it would have made their users lives easier. But the actual big opportunity which could make the whole GPU programming field far more dev friendly and could make the gpu vendor competition work in favour of users would be doing the GPU-IL in a cross-vendor way, driven by someone else than a single GPU vendor who is playing in the proprietary lock-in game (or certain to do it after gaining sufficient market position).