> Is the market for GPU developers so specialized that engineers get trapped in a company or set of companies?To put it bluntly: yes. The upside is that people stick around for a long time, so you get to know your coworkers, and people treat each other nicely.
> If those employees were uneasy was part of that driven by lack of opportunities for their skill set?
Definitely. Sometimes people are unhappy with their job but they don't want to move. So they either stick with a job they don't like, or get out of the GPU niche. Nowadays more people work remotely, so there is more mobility than there used to be, but you still have a very short list of places where you realistically want to work at, so people rarely burn any bridges.
> I'd imagine this is a niche where everyone knows each other no?
Yeah, it is a pretty small world. People are usually hired straight out of college, or they are poached from a competitor.
There is a lot of specialized knowledge, so it takes years for people to really be productive. I left AMD/Qualcomm after nine years and I was finally beginning to understand how that GPU worked. I then spent five years at NVidia and left frustrated with how little I had managed to learn about that behemoth. They are immensely complex systems.
> I wonder if this legacy would allow easier decomps of Xbox 360 software to run on Adreno GPUs?
Oh, such a good question! Let me think.
I don't know how much of the hardware was exposed in the XBox 360. If it was all standard DirecX, then the underlying hardware won't matter (modulo performance). But if they exposed some of the internal quirks, such as the aforementioned GMem, that could be easier to emulate on hardware of the same family. But only if that new hardware also exposes those hardware features, which is not a given.