GPU programming has a dirty secret: there is no real portability. CUDA owns NVIDIA, ROCm flails at AMD, Metal lives on Apple silicon, and SPIR-V is a compiler IR rather than something humans target. Anyone shipping GPU code today either picks a vendor lock-in, writes their kernels three times, or routes through a higher-level abstraction (Triton, MLIR, JAX) that ultimately punts the problem down to a vendor backend. The hardware itself is more similar than the software stacks pretend — SIMT execution, warp/wavefront scheduling, shared memory hierarchies — but the ISAs diverge in ways that make a true write-once kernel impossible.

Wave is staking out an ambitious position: a universal GPU instruction set architecture. Not another compute language, not another IR — an ISA. That is a meaningfully different claim. If the project delivers anything close to what the title promises, it would be the GPU world's equivalent of what RISC-V is doing to CPU ISAs: a clean, vendor-neutral target that hardware vendors could implement and compilers could trust.

What a technical reader should look for on the site:

• How Wave abstracts warp-level primitives (shuffles, ballot, reductions) across vendors whose widths differ — NVIDIA's 32-lane warps vs. AMD's 64-lane wavefronts vs. Apple's 32-lane SIMD-groups.
• Whether it targets execution semantics (like SPIR-V) or actually defines bit-level encoding that hardware could decode natively.
• How it handles memory model differences — Independent Thread Scheduling on post-Volta NVIDIA vs. AMD's stricter lockstep execution.
• The compiler story: is there a Wave → PTX / GCN / AIR translator already, and what is lost in lowering?

Even if Wave never becomes a hardware target, a well-designed common ISA is genuinely useful as a portable assembly layer — the place where Triton, Mojo, and JAX backends could converge instead of each maintaining N vendor-specific lowerings. That is roughly the role LLVM IR plays for CPUs, and the GPU world has been waiting for a credible equivalent for a decade.

One point and one comment is criminal for something tackling a problem this load-bearing for the entire ML and HPC ecosystem. Worth at least clicking through to see how serious the proposal is.