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Comment by psergeant | Hacker News Reader

> Nvidia contractually prohibits the use of GeForce and Titan cards in datacenters. So Amazon and other providers have to use the $8,500 datacenter version of the GPUs, and they have to charge a lot for renting it.

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I wondered how it is possible that they can restrict the use of hardware after it is bought. After reading the article I learned that they key is the license to the drivers.

So I guess in theory it would be possible for AWS to develop their own (or enhance open source) drivers. On the other hand they would spoil the business relationship with Nvidia and have to do without any discounts.

The problem is that there's already open-source nvidia driver -- https://nouveau.freedesktop.org -- but it's so feature incomplete that it's good only for hobby. You can't run CUDA on it, you can't run any recent games on it, you can run TensorFlow on it, you can't run PyTorch on it, etc etc -- it is essentially useless and has been so for many years.

And often you have to disable it, because the system hangs if it's turned on.

Is Nvidia doing this only because they are a monopoly in the space and practically extorting here ?

Or are there any genuine costs associated with data center gpu models ?

The data centre editions have bigger heatsinks so you can run them 24/7. But that would cost a few dollars, not thousands...

It's market segmentation. AMD does the same thing. $600 consumer card becomes $4000 FirePro card with no hardware changes.

Curious of the MTBF (mean time between failure) rate of a GefForce/Titan series GPU under continuous utilization in datacenter conditions vs a desktop computer with intermittent usage. I don't want to believe Nvidia is just out to stiff cloud providers. Maybe it's to protect themselves from warranty abuse?

People who do crypto mining use consumer GPUs, and run them 24/7. You would imagine if it was cheaper overall to buy the datacenter edition they would. But they don't.

It's market segmentation. It doesn't need to be more than that

The failure rate of GeForce is higher than Tesla (though it's not that much worse in my experience these days). OEMs worked around this by burning the GPUs in for a couple days running HPC or DL code before sending them out to customers and then they binned the failed GPUs into gaming machines where bitwise reproducibility didn't matter as much. Also, it's usually the memory controller that's defective on 1080TIs so it's pretty easy to spot early.

NVIDIA was not amused.

Hasn't stopped Hetzner from offering 1080s in their servers.

The Nvidia driver licenses that prohibit US companies from using the HW are probably void in Germany/EU. Happens a lot.

Yes. Companies are not allowed to restrict the (legal) usage of something i bought. The only thing they can do is refusing support if i used their product in any means not covered by the license terms, but even this is really hard for them in reality.

It‘s the same with no-resell license terms. Within the EU companies cant forbid me reselling something i bought.

The restriction is on the drivers.

We're going full circle here. The EULAs, licenses etc. of US companies that try to restrict how you can use the Hardware/Software you bought are void in Germany (probably most of EU too) and can be ignored. In many cases they void other (legal) parts of those licenses too since the license is partly illegal.

I don't think that's universally true concerning software. I tried to do some research on the jurisdiction in the EU but got to no definitive conclusion.

However in case of reselling software the corresponding restriction is obviously seen as illegal (or non-binding) in the EU. On the other hand there are restrictions such as copying, running software X on Y computers etc that are valid and binding.

My blanked statement indeed does not cover some fundamental aspects. IP/Copyright laws are in place and will restrict consumer rights. So pirating software is still illegal.

BUT AFAIK you can make legal copies for Backup purposes of your legally acquired software.

Also AFAIK a restriction to run Software on a certain type of Hardware is not valid in Germany. For example I'm pretty sure that Apple can't do anything against Hackintoshs here.

I.e. russian law voids any prohibition on reverse engineering of software.

Interesting question is whether the company can sue you for this in the US jurisdiction.

Since the Eula comes with the driver, hetzner (and other hardware rentals) shouldn't be covered directly. They don't download and install the driver for you, so aren't a party of that contract in any case.

Could you reference a law which prohibits doing this?

Sounds like the US needs better antitrust/consumer laws.

Leader GPU too, they are Dutch

I wonder if the success AMD is having right now in the CPU space can in the future extend to the GPU space.

It would be awesome. I also wonder if in this case it is an issue of hardware or only something related to the drivers/API.

Can they make something similar/backwards-compatible with Cuda but cheaper/better?

How can Nvidia anymore enforce that than movie producers can stop rentals of physical media.

how would Amazon sell access to the GPUs without the customers being able to identify the models? Also, procuring data center amounts of GPUs is bound to leave quite the paper trail.

I think via the driver licensing

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