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Comment by fluffything | Hacker News Reader

You are not wrong, but the facts you have cherry picked fail to portrait the whole picture.

For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past.

The claim that Nintendo is the only company nvidia successfully collaborates with is just wrong:

- nvidia manufactures GPU chips, collaborates with dozens of OEMs to ship graphics cards

- nvidia collaborates with IBM which ships Power8,9,10 processors all with nvidia technology

- nvidia collaborates with OS vendors like microsoft very successfully

- nvidia collaborated with mellanox successfully and acquired it

- nvidia collaborates with ARM today...

The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well...

I mean, this is not nvidia specific.

You can take any big company, e.g., Apple, and paint a horrible case by cherry picking things (no Vulkan support on MacOSX forcing everyone to use Metal, they don't open source their C++ toolchain, etc.), yet Apple does many good things too (open sourced parts of their toolchain like LLVM, open source swift, etc.).

I mean, you even try to paint this as if Nvidia is the only company that Apple has parted ways with, yet Apple has long track record of parting ways with other companies (IBM PowerPC processors, Intel, ...). I'm pretty sure that the moment Apple is able to produce a competitive GFX card, they will part ways with AMD as well.

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> The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong [...]

Hey! Wait a second, there. Nvidia isn't bad because it has a properietary Linux driver. Nvidia is bad because it actively undermines open-source.

Quoting Linus Torvalds (2012) [0]:

> I'm also happy to very publicly point out that Nvidia has been one of the worst trouble spots we've had with hardware manufacturers, and that is really sad because then Nvidia tries to sell chips - a lot of chips - into the Android Market. Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with.

> [Lifts middle finger] So Nvidia, fuck you.

Nvidia managed to push some PR blurbs about how it was improving the open-source driver in 2014, but six years later, Nouveau is still crap compared to their proprietary driver [1].

Drew DeVault, on Nvidia support in Sway [2]:

> Nvidia, on the other hand, have been fucking assholes and have treated Linux like utter shit for our entire relationship. About a year ago they announced “Wayland support” for their proprietary driver. This included KMS and DRM support (years late, I might add), but not GBM support. They shipped something called EGLStreams instead, a concept that had been discussed and shot down by the Linux graphics development community before. They did this because it makes it easier for them to keep their driver proprietary without having work with Linux developers on it. Without GBM, Nvidia does not support Wayland, and they were real pricks for making some announcement like they actually did.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ

[1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-n...

[2]: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

Which is funny because AMD drivers on linux has been nothing short of trouble (both open source and proprietary) and Nvidia’s blob just works.

[citation needed] My experience directly conflicts with this and IIUC most GNU/Linux users have exactly the opposite impression. Maybe you're thinking of some past situation?

No I am thinking of the situation where the open source driver doesn’t have opencl support and the AMD drivers (fglrx) doesn’t compile or requires dependencies so old that it was dropped by the packagers for Arch Linux, all this for a few years until they come out with something that actually works when I’ve never ever had an issue with Nvidia. Also AMD never ever figured out how to fix screen tearing, or do so in a sane that doesn’t involve trial and error editing xorg.conf.

Even on Windows AMD drivers are the most unstable, bugged software that’s even been shipped. It’s been a long standing joke that AMD “has no drivers”.

Yeah, fglrx driver with the issues you mention, offered OpenGL 4.1 support on a graphic card I have.

The open source driver replacement only does OpenGL 3.3.

I guess I should be happy it does any OpenGL at all.

Here, my card on the travel netbook that I use,

https://www.gpuzoo.com/GPU-AMD/Radeon_HD_6320_IGP.html

The open source driver is kind of ok if the only thing we expect from it is getting a working X session.

Now if one wants to do some complex OpenGL stuff, then it might work, or not.

That card is super old, before GCN. Have you tried with something a little bit more recent?

I used to have a HD 7950 and it always worked perfectly, same with my current Vega 56.

Sure, how do I replace the card on an otherwise perfectly working laptop?

The usual linux answer to hardware problems, keeps being to buy new hardware.

I would say that's a much more prevalent attitude in the Windows and Mac worlds. Linux tries to keep compatibility with really old software. It was only 4 years ago that major distros started to require at least a 686, aka Pentium Pro, released in November 1995!

But at some point you have to consider if it's really worth it keeping a 10 year old laptop around. It's painful to say them goodbye, I know, I have been there, but for me it's just not worth it.

Asus sold the laptop with Windows 7 support as well, the drivers kept being updated up to Windows 8.1, and thanks to Windows driver ABI, those drivers work perfectly fine in Windows 10.

No need to throw a perfectly working laptop to enjoy the DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1 capabilities that it was sold for.

Take any AMD 5000 series card. I had a top of the line 5700.

Still no driver for compute 1 year later. I'm so happy i decided to return it and switch to intel instead of waiting for AMD or some random joe on their free time to add support for it to their open source driver.

So yeah. I'd take a working proprietary driver over no driver any day.

Sadly I have to agree. Ryzen 3400G here, getting hardware transcoding on the iGPU is something I still haven't sorted out. There have been several recent issues in kernel, AGESA firmware (I suspect there might be newer versions with potential fixes that my mobo manufacturer hasn't released yet; this is 1.0.0.4 Patch B) and drivers. I've had several rounds of hunting down and compiling various versions of driver packages, modules and kernels from source, trying third-party PPAs, to no avail. The amdgpu/amdgpupro mess adds another layer of confusion.

I am not sure if I am missing some update, need to set some undocumented kernel flag and/or BIOS setting, if it's a software issue or Í just made a mistake somewhere. Debian 10/11.

Meanwhile, as much as I wanted to get away from Intel, their drivers have never posed any issue at all.

I believe AGESA 1.0.0.4 Patch B broke something for the APUs, you should try either upgrading or downgrading your BIOS but what worked for me was downgrading to AGESA 1.0.0.3 ABB, both Windows and Linux has stopped crashing now, although I still get the occasional lockup when browsing with Firefox on Linux. I found out the culprit after stumbling into this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/gj9kpz/bsod_new_pc...

It's anecdotal of course, but my RX560 has been absolutely flawless on both Ubuntu and openSUSE, literally out of the box support on a standard install.

Ryzen 3700X and Radeon 5700 XT here. Not a single problem.

I have recently used Radeon 550, 560, 570, 5500 on AMD 5050e (yes, that old!), Ryzen 1600 (non af), 3100, 3600 and all have worked fine, Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 and 20.04. In fact on average I have found the various hardware configurations to be about 5% faster on Linux than Windows.

You don't even have to go to open source. You can see this hostile behaviour from their top-paying clients!

Microsoft own previous gen Xbox emulator on the next gen xbox (i think it was original xbox emulated in the 360, but i might be wrong) was impacted by the team having to reverse-engineer the GPU because nvidia refused to let the emulator people to have access to the documentation provided to the original team.

Stumbling around Google didn't find me much more info on this, do you have any citations or keywords I could follow up on?

Yes, they only can do only one good thing - go bankrupt. That would be the best news for open-source.

Should open-source perhaps drop NVidia, instead of the other way around?

This divestiture happened long ago, if your running Linux not on a server, then Intel and AMD are the only players making chips that work right out of the box.

Even there though, only Intel has a buttery smooth experience. Ryzen for laptops is half baked (terrible USB C docking performance, occasional crashing on Windows and Linux with the 2xxxU series CPU/GPU chips) and AMD GPUs still require manual intervention to load proprietary firmware.

AMD does make some performant mobile GPUs though, they work well in Debian!

Funny, I stick with NVidia because they still offer more reliable, performant drivers for Linux (or these days FreeBSD), open source or no.

How so? Aren't you still trapped on Xorg with their proprietary drivers?

I switched to Wayland a few years back as vsync is quite nice to have, but whenever I go back to Xorg for AnyDesk or TeamViewer on AMD or Intel there is a fair bit of tearing.

Nvidia could have a competitive open source driver tomorrow if they released redistributable firmware that allowed reclocking the GPU.

> How so? Aren't you still trapped on Xorg with their proprietary drivers?

As a FreeBSD user I'm still "trapped" on Xorg anyway, and in any case I'd rather stick with what works than learn some whole new way of doing things for marginal benefits.

This is the sort of mentality I left the *BSD world for. Xorg is not some elegant codebase that's being unfairly targeted by an upstart.

> Xorg is not some elegant codebase that's being unfairly targeted by an upstart.

I never said it was. I said it's a whole new way of doing things for marginal benefits; is that not accurate?

You're not. I've been using Wayland exclusively on FreeBSD for a couple years now, with both AMD and Intel GPUs.

How do you go back to Xorg? Logout/login and/or reboot or is there a better way? I'm asking this because I often need screen sharing to work with my customers (demoes, check problems, etc) and I'm sticking with Xorg because Wayland doesn't do screen sharing.

Or even if they simply stopped signing their firmware. Nouveau has been perfectly capable of writing their own firmware.

Intel's drivers are far more reliable in my experience.

Slightly more reliable, but they don't make any cards that are good enough for gaming with IME.

They might work, for some definition of working, now getting the full capabilities of the GPU is another matter.

OpenGL 3.3 when the proprietary drivers do OpenGL 4.1 for example.

https://www.gpuzoo.com/GPU-AMD/Radeon_HD_6320_IGP.html

> then Intel and AMD are the only players making chips that work right out of the box.

I have an Intel GFX card. Had an AMD 5700. Linux support sucked, switched back to intel.

So AFAICT, only intel and nvidia have good Linux driver support, and only intel has good open source linux driver support.

In recent years, Linux computers have evolved to a major revenue source for Nvidia thanks to deep learning. However, not desktop users are behind this but servers, due to Nvidia's proprietary CUDA API. If they open sourced it or rebuilt it on top of mesa, it'd make it easier for AMD to implement CUDA, getting access to the deep learning ecosystem that's currently locked into CUDA. Nvidia's sales would take a huge drop. So I think it's even more likely that their drivers remain proprietary.

Reality check?

https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/hipDNN

CUDA just works.

ROCm exists but many frameworks don't support it.

https://ai.stackexchange.com/a/16541

PyTorch supports ROCm quite well if you can follow three step build instructions instructions (https://lernapparat.de/pytorch-rocm/). TVM.ai also supports ROCm well. TF I didn't check.

FP32 performance for the VII is comparable to GTX20280Ti e.g. on Resnet training. Tensor Cores are cool, but 90% of people don't use FP16 that much.

I'm not sure that is the best reply that stackoverflow has ever seen.

The problem is that ROCm does not support many AMD compute cards, like their top of the line Navi-based one-year-old 5700 family.

Most frameworks do support ROCm though, so the ball is on AMDs court.

I can only speak for myself, but my understanding is that the Navi cards are not intended nor advertised for compute. Now, one might wish to get a consumer card with Arcturus after the Instinct MI100 is released or dislike that the Radeon VII is discontinued, or even that it wasn't split into render and compute lines, but basically, to me the complaint about Navi not being supported by ROCm sounds a bit like buying a boat and complaining that it can't fly. Driver support was bumpy for me with Linux 5.0 or so, but I haven't had trouble with just running whatever kernel Debian ships for quite a while now. But I must admit I don't use the GPU for anything but compute, so I don't know about graphics.

But your mileage may vary, I don't want to make people swear.

a GPU is a GPU, it's all just programs running on the shaders.

If AMD is unwilling to properly support its consumer GPUs in GPGPU workloads and NVIDIA is, then well... sounds like a good reason not to buy AMD.

It's really not a major ask, people have been running GPGPU programs on consumer cards since forever, even though they're "consumer" and sold as graphics cards and not compute accelerators. NVIDIA basically does this on purpose, people use their personal hardware to get a foot in the door of the ecosystem and end up writing programs that get run on big compute GPUs which NVIDIA makes big profits on, it's very intentional.

If AMD chooses not to do that, well... can't really blame people for avoiding their stuff when NVIDIA is willing to let you do this stuff on their cards and AMD isn't.

Call me back when ROCm supports their flagship graphics card.

The 5000 series has been out for an entire year without ROCm support at this point.

That is because AMD split graphics vs. compute and you look at a non-compute card. The Vega-based chips work quite well and the Radon VII is (or was, I'm afraid) an excellent value proposition.

So this is well outside my area of expertise; but that seems weird. I want AMD to shepherd the ecosystem to a point where I can run PyTorch with some support from a graphics card. Supporting some graphics cards and not others doesn't sound very promising.

It is amazing to watch how much of a struggle AMD is having with getting PyTorch to work with ROCm. It makes me appreciate what a good job Nvidia must have done with CUDA.

Nvidia has split lines too. But they understand the importance of getting developers on their platform.

(To be fair AMD has it planned, but it's behind several other priorities to them.)

> Vega-based chips work quite well

LOL what a fucking joke. Not even close.

Also that one VFIO bug makes one of the great advantages of Radeon disappear and there is no fix in sight.

Fuck AMD. Bunch of marketing hype and they ship garbage half baked crap to the market.

Yeah... I learned this the hard way.

I thought AMD had great Linux driver support, and open source drivers.

Turns out AMD only has the open source driver part of the things, and this driver does not support a large chunk of their products.

I'd take a binary driver over no driver any day (and in fact, I returned the amd card and am using intel now, which works great).

difference between AMD and nvidia:

AMD: some open source drivers, but many things are inop

Nvidia: all closed source, but everything works

Source: I have a Vega 56 and I am gonna give it the sledgehammer when 3000 series arrives. Fuck that shit to high heavens my dude. ROCm is buggy as fuck. Only the bare basics work on Linux. Drivers are buggy, and crash all the time. Even the most basic bullshit is not implemented right. Like there is no fan control. That's how bad it is.

I don't have so much of a problem with CUDA staying closed, but rather Nvidia sabotaging Nouveau through signed firmware which they don't release (and obfuscate in their blob). Nouveau would be probably be decent by now (not as fast or feature complete, but usable for real workloads on newer cards) if it weren't for the fact that Nvidia has added features which have the direct effect of making it impossible to have a competitive open source driver.

Maybe something will change on this soon. There was speculation about this: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-O.... But I'm not holding my breath, and it would be nice if the solution wasn't "wait and hope until Nvidia releases the software necessary to control their GPUs".

> I don't have so much of a problem with CUDA staying closed, but rather Nvidia sabotaging Nouveau through signed firmware which they don't release (and obfuscate in their blob)

Do you have more info on this ? There is a big difference between not supporting open source, and actively sabotaging it. What are they doing, exactly ?

Look up "nouveau signed firmware". Phoronix has a bunch of articles on it. The Nouveau developers also talk about it at FOSDEM 2018 (and probably a later conference). This comment is a good intro: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d...

TL;DR starting with the 9xx series, Nvidia started making it so their GPUs would only run firmwares signed by them (likely to prevent counterfeits, i.e. 2060s sold as 2080s). So it is impossible to control the fans and reclock the GPU. There's no workaround, so even as the person who owns the device, I can't run my own firmware. AMD has signed firmwares too, but they actually release sufficient blobs to fully run the device.

Wow, that's insane, thanks for sharing this.

When I had nvidia hardware, I never tried nouveau, so I never ran into this.

> Quoting Linus Torvalds (2012) [0]:

Is this an Ad Hominem ? Linus does not mention there a single thing that they are actually doing wrong.

> Drew DeVault, on Nvidia support in Sway [2]:

Nvidia has added wayland support to both KDE and GNOME. Drew just does not want to support the nvidia-wy in wl-roots, which is a super super niche WM toolkit whose "major" user is sway, another super super niche WM.

Drew is angry for two reasons. First, sway users complain to them that sway does not work with nvidia hardware, which as a user of a WM is a rightful thing to complain about. Second, Drew does not want to support the nvidia-way, and it is angry and nvidia because they do not support the way that wl-roots has chosen.

It is 100% ok for Drew to say that they don't want to maintain 2 code-paths, and wl-roots and sway do not support nvidia. It is also 100% ok for nvidia to consider wl-roots to niche to be worth the effort.

What's IMO not ok is for Drew to feel entitled about getting nvidia to support wl-roots. Nvidia does not owe wl-roots anything.

---

IMO when it comes to drivers and open-source, a lot of the anger and conflict seems to steem from a sentiment of entitlement.

I read online comments _every day_ of people that have bought some hardware that's advertised as "does not support Linux" (or Macos, or whatever) being angry at the hardware manufacturer (why doesn't your hardware support the platform that says it does not support? I'm entitled to support!!!), the dozens of volunteers that reverse engineer and develop open source drivers for free (why doesn't the open source driver that you develop in your free time work correctly? I'm entitled to you working for free for me so that I can watch netflix!), etc. etc. etc.

The truth of the matter is, that for people using nvidia hardware on linux for Machine Learning, CAD, rendering, visualization, games, etc. their hardware works just fine if you use the only driver that they support on the platforms they say they support.

The only complaints I hear is people buying nvidia to do something that they know is not supported and then lashing out at everybody else due to entitlement.

What exactly are you invested in in this discussion? We were originally discussing Nvidia's business practices don't match ARM's business practices. But you seem to just want to take on people's personal views on Nvidia now.

You're now somehow arguing with people that they should stop complaining about Nvidia's business practices. I would agree with that in the sense that Nvidia can do whatever they want: nobody is obliged to buy Nvidia, and Nvidia is not obliged to cater to everyone's needs. It's a free enough market. But even if you don't agree with some/most of the complaints surely you must agree that Nvidia's track record of pissing of both other companies (and people) is problematic for when they take control of a company with an ecosystem driven business model like ARM's?

> I would agree with that in the sense that Nvidia can do whatever they want: nobody is obliged to buy Nvidia, and Nvidia is not obliged to cater to everyone's needs. It's a free enough market.

I'd agree with you this is OP's argument, however it's main flaw is in explicitly omitting the fact that NVidia is not the only party that's "free" to do things.

We're not obliged to buy their cards and we aren't obliged to stay silent regarding its treatment of the open-source community and why we think it would be bad for them to acquire ARM.

I am always amazed at the amount of pro-corporate spin from (presumably) regular people who are little more than occasional customers.

> We were originally discussing Nvidia's business practices don't match ARM's business practices.

We still are. I asked about "which specific business practices are these", and was only pointed out to ad hominems, entitlement, and one sided arguments.

Feel free to continue discussing that on the different parent thread. I'm interested on multiple views on this.

> You're now somehow arguing with people that they should stop complaining about Nvidia's business practices

No. I couldn't care less about nvidia, but when somebody acts like an entitled choosing beggar, I point that out. And there is a lot of entitlement in the arguments that people are making about why nvidia is bad at working with others.

Nvidia has some of the best drivers for Linux there are. This driver is not open source and distributed as a binary blob. Nvidia is very clear that this is the only driver that they support on Linux, and if you are not fine with that, they are fine with you not buying their products. This driver supports all of their products very well (as opposed to AMD's, for example), its development is made by people being paid full time to do it (as opposed to most of their competitors which also have people helping on their drivers on their free time - this is not necessarily bad, but it is what it is), and some of their developments are contributed back to open source, for free.

People are angry about this. Why? The only thing that comes to mind is entitlement. Somebody wants to use an nvidia card on Linux without using their proprietary driver. They know this is not supported. Yet they buy the card anyways, and then they complain. They do not only complain about nvidia. They also complain about, e.g., nouveau being bad, the Linux kernel being bad, and many other things. As if nvidia, or as if the people working on nouveau or the Linux kernel for free on their free time owes them anything.

I respect people not wanting to use closed source software. Don't use windows, don't use macosx, use alternatives. Want to use linux? don't use nvidia if you don't want to.

No, thank you. Can we do without the Reddit attitude here please? The choosing beggars, the needless quoting of debate fallacies in what is not a debate?

If you ask your impression of Nvidia's business practices, and they give you their opinion, you can't somehow invalidate that opinion by retorting with debate fallacies. That's the "fallacy fallacy" if you're sensitive to that. This is not a debate competition about who's right, this is people giving their opinions based on Nvidia's past and current actions. You asked a question, and they answered. This is not a competition. Please give them the basic respect of acknowledging their opinion.

This is so wrong.

We are discussing a topic, and people throwed multiple arguments that do not make sense.

You are claiming that I should just shut up and respect their feelings, but that is worthless.

Two examples:

---

Somebody's argument was: "Linus doesn't like them, therefore I don't like them".

The reason these are called logical fallacies is because these arguments are illogical. I told them that this was a logical fallacy (argument of authority - just because someone with authority makes an argument does not mean they are right), and ask them _why_, what is it that linus and you do not like.

I am happy I did that, because many of them have raised multiple actually-valuable arguments in response. For example, because nvidia's hardware throttles down if the driver firmware is not signed, and this makes the open source drivers slower for no reason.

That's a valid and valuable argument. Linus doesn't like them is worthless.

The person who raised this argument learned something from somebody else which knew what Linus did not like, and so did I.

---

The same happened when I called out the entitled choosing beggars. "Why are you angry at nvidia for not providing an open source driver ? You knew before buying their product that only the binary driver was supported."

Read the responses. The reason they are angry, is because they don't have a choice but to use nvidia, because the competition products (AMD in those cases) are much worse. AMD does have open source drivers, but they are crap, and they don't support many of AMD's products, at least for compute, which is something that many (including myself) use for work.

These people have picked a platform that values open source code, but due to their job requiring them to actually get some work done, they must use nvidia for that, and they don't like having to compromise on a proprietary driver.

Honestly, I think this is still entitlement, but I definitely sympathize with the frustration of having to make compromises one does not like.

---

From the point of view of whether nvidia buying ARM is good or bad. I still have no idea. ARM does _a lot_ of open source work, its major market are Android and Linux communities.

I understand that people are afraid that Nvidia will turn ARM into a bad open source player. It can happen. But without Android, iOS, and Linux, ARM is worthless. So a different outcome of this could be that NVIDIA buying ARM ends up making NVIDIA more open source friendly, since at least the Linux market is important for nvidia as well (~50% of their revenue).

It definitely makes sense for regulatory authorities to only allow somebody to buy ARM that will preserve ARM deals with current vendors (apple, google, samsung, etc.), and that also will preserve ARM open platform efforts.

If nvidia does not agree to that, they should not be allowed to buy arm.

> their hardware works just fine if you use the only driver that they support on the platforms they say they support.

Except that they stop supporting older HW at some point. That, together with occasional crashes learned me not to buy nVidia HW again.

> Nvidia has added wayland support to both KDE and GNOME.

NVIDIA insisted on pushing its own EGL streams even as the wider community was moving in a different direction.

They suffer from a major NIH syndrome and do not know how to work with others at all.

Speaking as a Linux graphics developer, I can confirm that NVidia indeed is a pretty terrible actor. There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing, NVidia knows this.

A NVidia purchase of ARM would also create a lot of conflicts of interest.

> There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing

I always just assumed that interfacing proprietary IP with the GPL is a tricky legal business. One slip, and all your IP becomes open source.

Do you have a source explaining what licensing changes they would have to make and what impact would that have for Linux and Nvidia ? I'd like to read that.

AMD and Intel had been providing open source drivers for their gpus for long time and they've yet to have had any legal problems with it.

Perhaps Nvidia's ASICs and/or firmware contains more legally dubious components. ;-)

AMD didn't directly open source their driver because if legal issues.

The point is it's not about open sourcing your properitary driver but about not getting in the way of an alternative open source driver, maybe even letting it a bit of an have even if just unofficially.

I thing if I where nvidea I might go in the direction of having a fully it at least partially open source driver for graphic stuff and a not so open source driver for headless CUDA (potentially running alongside a Intel integrated graphics based head/GUI).

Through I don't know what they plan wrt. ARM desktops/servers so this might conflict with their strategies there.

> I always just assumed that interfacing proprietary IP with the GPL is a tricky legal business. One slip, and all your IP becomes open source.

This persistent bit of FUD really needs to die. Yes, you have to be careful, but at this point it's ridiculously well-known what is obviously correct and what is obviously incorrect when dealing with GPL. I'm sure there are some grey ares that haven't been worked out, but avoiding those is fairly simple.

Nvidia is already in a weird grey area, releasing binary blobs with an "open source" shim that adapts its interfaces to the GPL kernel. As much as the Linux kernel's pragmatic approach toward licensing helps make it easier on some hardware manufacturers, sometimes I wish they'd take a hard line and refuse to carve out exceptions for binary drivers, inasmuch as those can sometimes/always be considered derived works.

I don't know if statement about interfacing with GPL is true or not but your statement first calls it a FUD, meaning you believe it is false, and then you say all the driver code should be considered derivative work and therefore be subject to GPL, meaning that original statement you called a FUD is actually true. Seems to me that a lot of GPL advocates are actually responsible for a good part of the GPL FUD.

> This persistent bit of FUD really needs to die. [...] I'm sure there are some grey ares that haven't been worked out

Way to contradict yourself.

> but avoiding those is fairly simple.

[Citation needed].

> As much as the Linux kernel's pragmatic approach toward licensing helps make it easier on some hardware manufacturers, sometimes I wish they'd take a hard line and refuse to carve out exceptions for binary drivers, inasmuch as those can sometimes/always be considered derived works.

Maybe this is what needs to happen to force companies to change their mindset, but where I work, lawyers tell us to (1) never contribute to any GPL'ed based code, (2) never distribute GPL'ed code to anybody (e.g. not even a docker container), etc.

Their argument is: a single slip could require us to publish all of your code, and make all of our IP open, and to make sure this doesn't happen, an army of lawyers and software engineers and managers would need to review every single code contribution that has something to do with the GPL. So the risks are very high, the cost of doing this right is very high as well, and the reward is... what exactly ? So in practice this means that we can't touch GPL'ed code with a 10 foot pole, it is not worth the hassle. If I were to ask my manager, it will tell me that it is not worth it. If they ask their manager, they will tell them the same. Etc.

BSD code ? No problem, we contribute to hundreds of BSD, MIT, Apache, ... licensed open source projects. Management tells us to just focus on those.

Nvidia has a very different model for what they're trying to get out of their drivers. They spent something like 5x more on the number of driver developers than AMD, then would send engineers to work with AAA game studios to "optimize their games" for Nvidia. Good so far. But then these optimizations went so far as fixing (in the driver) broken game code. Like apparently it was so bad that games were being shipped without issuing BeginScene/EndScene on DirectX.

Hence AMDs push for Mantle then Vulkan. The console like API is the carrot to get people to use an API that has an verification layer so that third parties can easily say "wow what a broken game" rather "wow this new game runs on Nvidia and not AMD, what broken AMD drivers".

Nvidia open sourcing their drivers completely destroys a large chunk of their competitive advantage and is so intertwined with all the IP of the games they have hacks for that I'd be surprised if they ever would want to open source them, or even could if they wanted to.

More docs would be nice though.

> But then these optimizations went so far as fixing (in the driver) broken game code.

AMD does the exact same thing and always has. When you see shaders come down the wire you can replace them with better-optimized or more performant versions. It's almost always fixing driver "bugs" in the game rather than actual game bugs. And the distinction is important.

I do agree with you, but that element is something everyone has to do to remain competitive in games. Developers will only optimize for one platform (because they're crunching), and 9 times out of 10 that's a RTX2080Ti.

Nvidia did more than that, hooking their drivers in the same way that they would for benchmarks "oh actually ignore this API call" "oh actually issues these two calls when you see this one call with this signature" "yes this game requested synchronization here, but just ignore it" kinds of things.

While yes AMD did similar things when they could, it was way less prevalent (if only because they didn't have the staff necessary to pull it off to the same degree).

Edit: Here's an example of some of the stuff I'm talking about that goes beyond shaders. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040305-00/?p=40...

But most of these games don't even exist on Linux.. So they wouldn't have to fix all that stuff.. As a Linux user I'd gladly do without that bloat anyway (also explains why a "driver" has to be 500MB lol)

Sure, but they can't open source their existing drivers since it's really the same driver source for Linux and Windows with all the IP problems.

And they don't see the benefit to create new drivers.

I agree they should help out more.

AMD supported Radeon & AMDGPU rather than releasing their own drivers, there is no reason Nvidia can't provide documentation and a simple open source firmware for their GPUs.

We could care less about the hacks and cludges baked into the proprietary Nvidia drivers and firmware focused on DirectX powered gaming. The current path Nvidia has chosen with signed firmware locks out open source developers from much of the low level operations of their GPUs.

The problem was never opening the existing driver.

It was:

- all kinds of problems wrt. the integration of the driver in the Linux Eco system, including the properitary driver having quality issues for anything but headless CUDA.

- nvidea getting in the way of the implementation of an open source alternative to their driver

Nouveau is a highly capable open source driver for NVIDIA GPUs based on reverse-engineering.

For some older card generations (e.g. GTX 600 series) it was competitive with the official driver. But in every hardware generation since then, the GPU requires signed firmware in order to run at any decent clock speed.

The necessary signed firmware is present inside the proprietary driver, but nouveau can't load it because it's against the ToS to redistribute it.

Most GPU features are available but run at 0.1x speed or slower because of this single reason. Nvidia could absolutely fix this "tomorrow" if they were motivated.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-...

Wow, that does suck. Imagine them doing the same thing with ARM.

Solution: Download the Nvidia blob, isolate the binary firmware, extract, load. Be fun? Absolutely not. Desperate times and inconsciable acts of legalism call for equally extreme levels of overly contrived legalism circumvention.

At this point I've gotten so bloody tired of the games people play with IP, that I'm arriving at the point I think I wouldn't even mind being part of the collateral damage of our industry being burned to the ground through the complete dissolution of any software delivered or related contract. If you sell me hardware, and play shenanigans to keep me from being able to use it to it's fullest capability, you're violating the intent of the rights of First Sale.

To be honest, I think every graphics card should have to be sold bundled with enough information for a layperson (or I'll throw out a bone,a reasonably adept engineer) to write their own hardware driver/firmware. Without that requirement, this industry will never change.

The GPL can't cause your code to automatically become GPL licensed. It can only prevent you from distributing the combination of your incompatibly licensed code and others' GPL code.

>I always just assumed that interfacing proprietary IP with the GPL is a tricky legal business. One slip, and all your IP becomes open source.

The only tricky things involve blatantly betraying the spirit of the agreement while trying to pretend to follow the letter and hoping a judge supports your interesting reading of the law.

Even so there is no provision in law wherein someone can sue you and magically come into possession of your IP.

It would literally require magical thinking.

And selling for only 32 billion seems really low for a company that significant.

$18B less than Tiktok (rumored valuation at $50B). That's hard for me to grasp.

I don’t want no ads on me CPUs

The flawless execution of these instructions has been sponsored by RAID bug spray.

RAID-5 bug spray, presumably?

now with extra parody!

How many ARM chips will the average consumer buy in their life? How much profit will ARM make on each of those chips? How many Tiktok videos will the average consumer watch in their life? How much profit will Tiktok make on each of those views?

I have more Arm CPUs in consumer devices within arms reach at this moment than the number of Tiktok videos I’ve seen in my entire life.

Other people watch more TikTok videos in a single day than the number of ARM consumer devices that you've owned in your entire life.

But if we are doing nonsense comparisons let’s use the number of ARM clock cycles for devices you own.

It’s not nonsense - Arm gets paid per device, TikTok get paid per ad impression (and views are a good proxy for that)

But the pay for each of those is orders of magnitude apart.

Here's an estimate of ARM's revenue per chip at 10 cents (profit maybe half that).

[1]https://qz.com/741078/a-company-that-doesnt-really-make-chip...

Here's an estimate of youtube (not exactly tiktok, but not exactly not), revenue at 10 to 30 cents per view.

[2]https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-do-youtubers-mak...

Sorry, this is wrong by an order of magnitude. Youtube is making more like 1-3 cents per view.

that article makes me wonder if the beos would have survived if they switched from Hobbit to arm chips and stuck with selling hardware+software, and later on added x86/x64/PPC/POWER. A tight integration of hw+sw has worked for apple.

My guess is no.

I loved BeOS, but there was an even more fundamental problem that put a limit on its days: A failure to anticipate coming need for home computers to become more secure. At the same time that Microsoft and Apple were both working frantically to ditch their old single-user desktop operating systems and replace them with, in effect, spruced up versions of existing server/workstation operating systems, Be was trying to launch a brand new OS on the dying model. Had they survived even a couple years longer, they would have had to reckon with that, and they simply didn't have the resources to navigate such a fundamental transition.

The sheer number of TikTok videos that have been watched on an Arm device. Arm soon to rebrand as TikArmTok.

Compared to the number of pixels * the number of video frames displayed by Tikki…

They watch those TikTok videos on devices powered by ARM SoCs.

Same here, which makes neither of us an “average consumer”.

By this logic, TicTac should be worth more than all car manufacturers combined, since there are more TicTacs in an 1$ pack than I will ever buy cars in my entire life. And I'm sure their margin is much higher, percentage-wise, at least compared to most car manufacturers.

Let's be real here: TikTok is a big social network, yes, but ARM owns most of the embedded market. Every smartphone your average consumer buys runs an ARM chip. And hardware is harder to replace than software.

Car manufacturers make about $2k per car. Do you buy 2k packs of TicTac every 10 years?

Maybe ARM should copy the business model of more valuable companies like TikTok by harvesting and selling it's users data. Surely the data flowing through a SOC is worth something.

ARM doesn't manufacture chips, they license ARM Processor 'designs'.

ARM is more of a household name for their use in mobile phones but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

I think you underestimate how many ARM chips you have in a single car or delivery truck.

Add to that:

- farming machinery

- construction machinery

- factory line automation

- elevators, escalators

- EV chargers

- fridges, washing machines, ovens

- medical devices such as drug-infusion pumps, ventilators, surgical machinery, etc.

- Auxiliary modules in aeroplanes and shipping containers.

- Infrastructure for Road, Rail, Power Grid with ARM processors running headless embedded systems

- Anything the size of a pebble with bluetooth connectivity uses nordic's nRF chip (which is yet again an ARM chip)

ARM processors are hiding in plain sight in the world all around you.

I understand the point you make, from a business standpoint, on how Tiktok might scale. The thing that is bizarre for me and I agree with the parent's sentiment, is how disconnected the valuation is from the real-world impact and objective _usefulness_ of ARM versus Tiktok.

Edit: bullet points

> The thing that is bizarre for me and I agree with the parent's sentiment, is how disconnected the valuation is from the real-world impact and objective _usefulness_ of ARM versus Tiktok.

Also how easily the technology behind Tiktok can be duplicated compared to ARM.

Anyway, it's probably all about the network effect and brand value.

ARM has no exposure to any end consumers and takes the tiniest sliver from each sale—if anything at all.

Tiktok can deliver arbitrary content to hundreds of millions of people’s eyeballs around the planet.

Also Intel ME and (not sure, but probably) AMD PSP.

The ME runs on an ARC chip, not ARM.

It did run on ARC, but now it's just a 486.

ARM processors are also in pretty much any storage device like hard drives too.

Per-video profit isn't really meaningful; these kinds of companies report revenue (and thus profit) base on the number of active users.

Consider that in 2017, 21 billion ARM chips were manufactured (doubled in 4 years, from 10 billion in 2013), and that ARM's licensing fees are over 2% of chip cost for current high-end designs (and they're talking about raising that even more). They have 95%+ of the mobile phone market, are making inroads in the server market, and will soon be in every Apple laptop, which I expect will grow the market for ARM laptops even outside Apple. It wouldn't be a stretch to find them in common desktop computers after that. They're in smart TVs, washing machines, robot vacuum cleaners, and all other kinds of smart (and non-smart) appliances. Even SSDs have their own embedded ARM chip. And that's just home/consumer stuff; haven't even scratched industrial/commercial applications, of which there are a ton.

I could easily see yearly production at over 100 billion chips before 2030, probably even before 2025. While I'd love to see something like RISC-V take off commercially, I don't think that's realistic.

Meanwhile, social media users are incredibly fickle; platforms are subject to fad and fashion. Certainly Facebook and Instagram are still huge behemoths, but their growth is nothing like it once was, with people -- especially younger people, trying to distinguish themselves from their older, boring relatives -- flocking to TikTok. I fully expect TikTok will be in Instagram's boat in under 10 years, with some other platform taking its place.

ARM seems like an amazingly great short-, medium-, and long-term bet, while TikTok feels like a nice short- (maybe medium-, if they're lucky) term money-maker, and even that feels like a big maybe: I have no idea what their ad revenue per user looks like, but it's probably not great since their audience skews younger. Teenagers and college kids don't have much in the way of discretionary income. Then again, TikTok doesn't pay their creators like e.g. YouTube does, so they get to keep all that ad revenue.

21 billion is 3 per person per year for everyone in the world, including rural goat herders etc. who don’t consume very many. I don’t doubt the number but it’s still wild.

If you don’t see RISC-V taking off commercially, then why is ARM trying to sell? I ask because my understanding was that they were trying to exit because of RISC-V.

If you see that is one of the options I don’t think Nvidia did not see that possibility as well. Yet they still plan to buy ARM.

I think it's just trying to sell because Softbank is a venture capital company, they only care about short-term profits.

PS I applaud RISC-V but it won't take over the market for a long time, and it wouldn't drive ARM out completely, I'm sure. Intel's had many competitors and they're doing just fine (even despite screwing up repeatedly with their processes!)

Look at all the failed attempts to move away from x86(/64). Even intel tried it with Itanium and failed, HP has to pay them to keep making it so they can fulfull their server contracts. I'm sure ARM has a similar hold on the mobile market.

> Intel's had many competitors and they're doing just fine (even despite screwing up repeatedly with their processes!)

With AWS offering ARM systems, all the Chromebooks, Apple, the complete loss of the phone market, Intel’s staying power is about to be tested to the extreme.

Most of those don't matter and didn't matter anyway: Chromebooks and Apple desktops are a tiny portion of a small market; Apple's volume chips are iPhones. Intel never really had a grip on any kind of mobile handset market and hasn't for years, despite that they still post record profits. That's because the margins on handsets are very slim, unless you're Apple.

The only actual major change here is AWS offering Graviton, which actually hints at their real cash cow: datacenter SKUs with absurd markup. Something like 80% of their profit margins are here. More accurately, the change is that there are now viable silicon competitors to Intel in the performance department. So it's now clear that ultra-integrated hyperscalers who can actually afford tape out costs (7nm CPUs are not cheap to produce in volume) have an option to vertically integrate with e.g. Neoverse. Smaller players will not do this still, because alternative options like Rome will be adequate. But the only reason any of them are changing anything is cost savings, because now there are actual viable competitors to Intel when there were zero of them for like, 15 years. Producing cutting edge silicon products isn't easy, but it's very profitable, it turns out.

To be clear, Intel isn't charging $10,000 for a Xeon Platinum because it costs $9500 to make and they make $500 in profit. (Likewise, AMD doesn't produce competitors at 1/5th the price because they made a revolutionary, scientific breakthrough in processor design.) They're charging what you'll pay, not what it takes to produce. Seeing as they currently still have a complete stranglehold on the datacenter industry and make more in a quarter than most of their competitors do in several years, I suspect they've got much more "staying power" than the watercooler chat on this website would lead you to believe.

Softbank had a bad year and is in need of cash not to collapse.

Softbank is selling ARM because they are broke.

The Softbank guy invested a ton of money on WeWork. Tried to sell WeWork for 60 billion, but before that happen WeWork valuation dropped out to 2-5 billion (huge loss). That was in 2019. Afterwards, Softbank invested another 10 billions to try to save it. WeWork owns and also pays rent or hundreds of office buildings in the most expensive zones of all the major capitals in the world. 2020 COVID now means these super expensive offices are now empty, since WeWork customers pay a premium to be able to cancel their leases in <1 week. So essentially, WeWork is broke, worth 0, and Softbank has lost dozens of billions on it.

On top, Softbank owns a huge chunk of Uber, which is also worth close to zero now that people are not travelling due to COVID...

So... yeah... Softbank is selling ARM because they must. They are super broke, and investors are going to pull the money that remains out. Selling ARM and giving investors a tiny benefit so that they keep their money is better than them taking a huge loss this year.

TikTok is doubling every one year, and is getting around one billion views per day. I'd imagine that TikTok's growth over the next five years is going to be both faster and larger than ARM's. ARM makes around the same per chip (10 cents) that Youtube is making per view.

Now, certainly TikTok might not be sustainable and might disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow. Or it might become a juggernaut that overtakes Facebook.

Do you have a source for the cents per view on YouTube?

> Google pays out 68% of their AdSense revenue, so for every $100 an advertiser pays, Google pays $68 to the publisher.

> The actual rates an advertiser pays varies, usually between $0.10 to $0.30 per view, but averages out at $0.18 per view.

https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-do-youtubers-mak...

$18 divided by a thousand is 1.8 cents, not 18 cents.

This also is only people that watch the whole ad.

Oh! That is quite the mistake. It does look to be more on the order of cents per view.

Sorry, this is wrong by an order of magnitude. Youtube is making more like 1-3 cents per view.

Something like Tiktok can myspace in the blink of an eye. Established CPU architectures have enormous staying power.

MIPS sure didn't, same for SPARC. CPU architectures can effectively die in a handful of years just like MySpace, Delicious, Digg and such.

Even decades after starting to decline both are still less dead than the average former social media fad.

MySpace is dead, dead. You'll still find devices, especially in manufacturing, that are still running on a MIPS, and are essential to the process. You'll still find them in various cheap toys on the shelves.

MIPS _should_ be dead, half the manufacturers of the chip have stopped. But, Imagination Technology still sell a considerable number to Apple every year.

Considering Apple is moving their desktops to ARM and pretty much all iOS devices are ARM...

What if giphy was worth 100x ARM, would it be interesting then?

> How many Tiktok videos will the average consumer watch in their life?

This number is not unbounded. It will converge to some asymptotic limit.

> How much profit will Tiktok make on each of those views?

Around a tenth of a cent per view.

These huge valuations are purely because people don't do the math and don't know how the market works.

... Meanwhile Microsoft is busy buying Tik-Tok (eye roll)

Source? Didn’t hear this was happening

Edit: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-tiktok-donald-trum...

This is some very fresh news.

Microsoft buying ARM would be interesting.

It is quite simple really. You seem to be under the mistaken impression that valuations in tech are based in any way on logic. They're not. They're completely hype-driven.

That's how this year's myspace, which people will have trouble remembering 5 years from now, can get a higher "valuation" than a large semiconductor company with a 30 year track record.

Investors and the financial sector are proving time and time again that they're unable to learn from their mistakes, through no "fault" of their own, because apparently it's human nature to just be horribly bad at this.

It amazes me that people think investors somehow learned anything from the dot-com bubble, given they've been repeating all of their other major mistakes every odd year or so.

Company valuation usually involves more tangible things, like revenue and profits, or at least expected revenues. "Importance" can vanish really fast.

We don't really live in that world anymore – what is value investing when the Federal Reserve sets the price? More and more, "intagibles" like brand value are becoming more important on balance sheets than investors want to admit.

For me it is hard to grasp if this really is a paradigm shift or merely some valuation cycle aka https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1280531290635157505

For me Tesla stock value is where it got confirmed stock valuation diverged from any data points. I understand there is a potential huge upside there, but no real data points would justify anything close to the current valuation.

Especially in comparison to 9 months ago, the fundamentals did not really change (conpetitive landscape etc.) There was the CyberTruck announcement, though

Another context to add to this.

This might also be part of SoftBank’s fire sale which bought ARM for $32B just few years ago (2018?)

I am starting to see a lot of these similar comments around the internet.

I think, it is because people are now so used to Apple and Amazon's trillion valuation, with Apple closing in to 2 Trillion, people think $32B is low or ( relatively ) cheap.

Reality is ARM was quite over valued when it was purchased by Softbank.

Out of interest how much work does ARM put into the Linux kernel, OSS compilers, OSS libraries.

Quite a lot.

Take a look at a recent snapshot of changesets and lines of code to the Linux kernel contributed by various employers: https://lwn.net/Articles/816162/

Arm themselves is listed at 1.8% by changesets; but Linaro is a software development shop funded by Arm and other Arm licensees to work on Arm support in various free software, and they contributed 4% of changesets and 8.8% by lines of code. And Code Aurora Forum is an effort to help various hardware vendors, many of whom are Arm vendors, get drivers upstreamed, and they contributed 1.8% by changesets and 10.1% by lines changed. A number of other top companies listed are also Arm licensees, though their support may be for random drivers or other CPU architectures as well.

However, Arm and companies in the Arm ecosystem do make up a fairly large amount of the code contributed to Linux, even if much of it is just drivers for random hardware.

And Arm and Linaro developers also contribute to GCC, LLVM, Rust, and more.

I think the main question is weather they will "just" own AMD it weather they will absorb it.

There’s no defending Nvidia’s approach to Linux and OSS. It is plain awful no matter how you try to twist the reality. And it is actively damaging because it forces extra work on OSS maintainers and frustrates users. You should not be required to install a binary blob in 2020 to get basic functionality (like fan control) to work. Optimus and wayland support is painfully, purposely bad.

> You should not be required to install a binary blob in 2020 to get basic functionality (like fan control) to work.

You are not required to do that. Use nouveau, buy an AMD or intel GFX card.

You are not entitled to it either. People developing nouveau on their free time don't owe you anything, and nvidia does not owe you an open source driver either.

I don't really understand the entitlement here. None of the drivers on my windows and macosx machines are open source. They are all binary blobs.

I don't use nvidia GFX cards on linux anymore (intel suffices for my needs), but when I did, I was happy to have a working driver at all. That was a huge upgrade from my previous ATI card, which had no driver at all. Hell, I even tried using AMD's ROCm recently on Linux with a 5700 card, and it wasn't supported at all... I would have been very happy to hear that AMD had a binary driver that made it work, but unfortunately it doesn't.

And that was very disappointing because I thought AMD had good open source driver support. At least when buying Nvidia for Linux, you know beforehand that you are going to have to use a proprietary driver, and if that makes you uncomfortable, you can buy just something else.

> You are not required to do that. Use nouveau, buy an AMD or intel GFX card.

Has internet discussion really fallen this low that all needs to be spelled out and no context can ever be implied?

We're in a thread about NVidia, so of course OP's talking about NVidia hardware here. Yeah, they can get AMD, but that does not change their (valid) criticisms of NVidia one bit.

> I don't really understand the entitlement here. None of the drivers on my windows and macosx machines are open source. They are all binary blobs.

Aaand?

Windows and macOS have different standard for drivers than many Linux users do. Is it really that surprising that users who went with an open-source operating system find open-source drivers desirable too?

I find it really weird to assume that because something is happening somewhere, it's some kind of an "objective fact of reality" that has to be true for everyone, everywhere.

When you shop for things, are you looking for certain features in a product? Would you perhaps suggest in a review that you'd be happier if a product had a certain feature or that you'd be more likely to recommend it?

It's the same thing. NVidia is not some lonely developer on GitHub hacking during their lunch break on free software.

Do you also assume that the kind of music you find interesting is objectively interesting for everyone?

This has nothing to do with entitlement. It's listing reasons for why someone thinks NVidia buying ARM is a bad idea.

> Is it really that surprising that users who went with an open-source operating system find open-source drivers desirable too? When you shop for things, are you looking for certain features in a product? Would you perhaps suggest in a review that you'd be happier if a product had a certain feature or that you'd be more likely to recommend it?

It is to me. When I buy a car, I do not leave a 1 star review stating "This car is not a motorcycle; extremely disappointed.".

That's exactly how these comments being made sound to me. Nvidia is very clear that they only support their proprietary driver, and they deliver on that.

I have many GFX card from all vendors over the years, and I've had to send one back because the vendor wasn't honest about things like that.

Do I wish nvidia had good open source drivers? Sure. Do I blame nvidia for these not existing, not really. That would be like blaming microsoft or apple for not making all their software open source.

I do however blame vendors that do advertise good open source driver support that ends up being crap.

What does any of this have to do with nvidia buying or not buying arm ? Probably nothing.

What nvidia does with their GFX driver can be as different from what ARM does, as what Microsoft does with Windows and Github.

> When I buy a car, I do not leave a 1 star review stating "This car is not a motorcycle; extremely disappointed."

That's a bad analogy. A better one would be it's like you bought a car, (an open-source operating system) and this one accessory supplier is selling you what are really motorcycle parts, but just about fit the car barely, (a less-than-great proprietary driver when you explicitly are on an open system). Additionally, they are extremely secretive and absolutely refuse to answer any sort of questions or allow you to modify the parts you purchased from them to fit better by implementing various forms of DRM.

You can just not buy those parts and indeed that's what many users are doing.

This is separate from raising concerns about this somewhat dodgy parts manufacturer potentially acquiring another manufacturer, specifically one that does require a lot of cooperation with others by its very nature.

> Nvidia is very clear that they only support their proprietary driver, and they deliver on that.

It's more complex than that. They seem to actively implement features to make it purposely more difficult to develop an independent open-source driver. This is rather different than just being passively indifferent to open-source. Moreover their proprietary driver can be less than seller too, so am not so sure they "deliver" even on that.

Therefore we, Linux users, can refuse to support a company that only supports their (lacking) proprietary driver and certainly we are within our rights to raise concerns about its purchase of ARM given its actively hostile approach to open-source.

I don't know why this is downvoted. If any, Nvidia has been providing quality drivers for Linux for decades, and it was the only way to have a decent GPU supported by Linux in the 2000s, as ATI/AMD cards were awful in Linux.

I would probably agree with you if everything was modular and commodity and easily swappable. If I decide I won't buy hardware with nvidia in it, that chops out a chunk of the possibly laptops I can have. It means I can't repurpose older hardware; sure, hindsight may be 20/20, but perhaps I didn't have the foresight 7 years ago to realize I'd want to run Linux on something today (yeah, older hardware is better supported, but it's by no means universal). It means that I can't run some things that require CUDA and don't support something like OpenCL.

And you can argue that that still is all fine, and that if you're making a choice to run Linux, then you have to accept trade offs. And I'm sympathetic to that argument.

But you're also trying to say that we're not allowed to be angry at a company that's been hostile to our interests. And that's not a fair thing to require of us. If nvidia perhaps simply didn't care about supporting Linux at all, and just said, with equanimity, "sorry, we're not interested; please use one of our competitors or rely on a possibly-unreliable community-supported, reverse-engineered solution", then maybe it would be sorta ok. But they don't do that. They foist binary blobs on us, provide poor support, promise big things, never deliver, and actively try to force their programming model on the community as a whole, or require that the community do twice the amount of work to support their hardware. That's an abusive relationship.

Open source graphics stack developers have tried their hardest to fit nvidia into the game not because they care about nvidia, but because they care about their users, who may have nvidia hardware for a vast variety of reasons not entirely under their control, and developers want their stuff to work for their users. Open source developers have been treated so poorly by nvidia that they're finally starting to take the extreme step of deciding not to support people with nvidia hardware. I don't think you appreciate what a big deal that is, to be so fed up that you make a conscious choice to leave a double-digit percentage of your users and potential users out in the cold.

> None of the drivers on my windows and macosx machines are open source. They are all binary blobs.

Not sure how that's relevant. Windows and macOS are proprietary platforms. Linux is not, and should not be required to conform to the practices and norms of other platforms.

> But you're also trying to say that we're not allowed to be angry at a company that's been hostile to our interests

This company in no way shape or form is obligated to cater to your interests. In this case it would likely be counter to their interests.

Also the Nvidia Wayland support is horrible.

> For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past.

But for entirely different reasons. Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel because the PowerPC processors IBM was offering weren't competitive. They switched from Intel for some combination of the same reason (Intel's performance advantage has eroded) and to bring production in-house, not because Intel was quarrelsome to do business with.

Meanwhile Apple refused to do business with nVidia even at a time when they had the unambiguously most performant GPUs.

Apple didn't part ways with Intel and IBM because they were difficult to work with. They parted ways because Intel and IBM fell behind in performance. Nvidia has certainly not, and Apple has paid a price with worse graphics and machine learning support on Macs since their split. It's clearly different.

With intel it's a bit more complicated than that. I think running Macs on their own processors is a bit cost saver for them, and allows more control. And intel's CPU shortages have hurt their shipping schedules. I don't think this transition is about CPU performance.

But yeah I don't think it's about collaboration either.

Correct, IBM didn't care to make a power efficient processor and Motorola didn't see the benefit in Multimedia extension in their processor because they needed them for their network devices.

Nvidia introduced a set of laptop GPUs that had a high rate of failure. Instead of working with and eating some of the cost of repairing these laptops they told their customers to deal with it. Apple being one of their customers got upset and left holding the bag of shit and hasn't worked with them since.

Intel and AMD have used their x86/AMD64 patents to block Nvidia from entering the x86 CPU market.

Nvidia purchasing ARM will hurt not the large ARM licensees like Apple and Samsung but the ones that need to use the CPU in a device that does not need any of the Multimedia extensions that NVidia will be pushing.

> The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well...

Out of curiosity, is there any large open source product from NVidia? I can't think of any.

Only for their own hardware (RAPIDS, all the cuda libraries, etc.), which other companies like AMD have just forked and modified to work on their hardware keeping the algorithms intact.

NVIDIA contributes mostly to existing open source projects (LLVM, Linux kernel, Spark, etc.), see https://developer.nvidia.com/open-source

Not agreeing or disagreeing, just want to point out that LLVM was always open source and wasn't developed by Apple. Apple just happened to hire the dev who initially wrote it.

Most LLVM development has to my knowledge been funded by Apple. LLVM and Clang has seen the bulk of their work done on Apple payroll.

It is a bit like WebKit. It was based on KHTML which was an open source HTML renderer. But Apple expanded that so greatly on their own payroll that it is hard to call WebKit anything but an Apple product.

This is not true anymore. Apple funded a significant part of LLVM/Clang work in the 2010s, and then again with the aarch64 backend, but nowadays Google and Intel contribute much more to LLVM than Apple.

Yep. I didn't meant that Apple created LLVM, only that Apple contributes _a lot_ to the open source LLVM project.

I think the common theme in your examples is that in these situations other parties bend to Nvidia's demands. Nvidia has no problem with other parties bending to their demands. But when another company or organization requires Nvidia to bend to their demands, things go awry almost without exception.

EDIT - for added detail:

> - nvidia manufactures GPU chips, collaborates with dozens of OEMs to ship graphics cards

Most (all?) of which bend to Nvidia's demands because Nvidia's been extremely successful in getting end users to want their chips, making the Nvidia chip a selling point.

> - nvidia collaborates with IBM which ships Power8,9,10 processors all with nvidia technology

IBM bends to Nvidia's demands so POWER can remain a relevant HPC platform.

> - nvidia collaborates with OS vendors like microsoft very successfully

Microsoft is the only significant OS vendor with which Nvidia collaborates successfully. It's true - but for the longest time Nvidia would have been out of business if they didn't. I will concede this point, but I don't find this is enough to paint a different picture.

> - nvidia collaborated with mellanox successfully and acquired it

Mellanox bent over to Nvidia's demands to such an extent that they were acquired.

> - nvidia collaborates with ARM today...

Collaboration in what sense? My impression is that Nvidia and ARM have a plain passive customer/supplier relationship today.

Nvidia is humongously behind their competitors Intel and AMD in open source contribution while having a large amount more R&D in graphics. They are terrible at open source compared to the "industry standard" of their market, and only partake as far as it serves their short term needs.

They are perfectly entitled to behave this way, by the way. But Nvidia's open source track record is only more evidence is that they don't understand how to work in an open ecosystem, not less.

> You can take any big company, e.g., Apple, and paint a horrible case by cherry picking things (no Vulkan support on MacOSX forcing everyone to use Metal, they don't open source their C++ toolchain, etc.), yet Apple does many good things too (open sourced parts of their toolchain like LLVM, open source swift, etc.).

The "whataboutism" is valid but completely irrelevant here. I would also not appreciate Apple buying ARM.

> For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past.

Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM, Motorola, Samsung (SoCs) and PowerVR for technology strategy reasons, not relationship reasons. Apple had no reason to part ways with Nvidia for technical reasons (especially considering they went to AMD instead), but did so because of the terrible relationship they built.

> Apple had no reason to part ways with Nvidia for technical reasons (especially considering they went to AMD instead), but did so because of the terrible relationship they built.

I'm typing this on a MacBook with an Nvida GPU that was created in 2012, many years after the failing laptop GPU debacle. AFAIK, Apple used that GPU until 2015?

I'd wager that Apple has been using AMD for something as mundane as offering better pricing, rather than disagreement 12 years ago. (Again: despite all the lawsuits, Apple is still a major Samsung customer.)

> I'd wager that Apple has been using AMD for something as mundane as offering better pricing, rather than disagreement 12 years ago. (Again: despite all the lawsuits, Apple is still a major Samsung customer.)

This used to be true, as Apple swapped between AMD and Nvidia chips several times in 2000-2015. Then Nvidia and Apple fell out, and Apple has not used Nvidia chips in new designs in 5 years - a timeframe in which Nvidia coincidentally achieved its largest technical advantages over AMD. Apple goes as far as to actively prevent Nvidia's own macOS eGPU driver from working on modern macOS. A simple pricing dispute does not appear to be a good explanation here.

Whatever the reason may be, the fact that Apple used Nvidia GPUs until 2015 at least debunks the endlessly repeated theory that it was because of the broken GPUs of 2008.

What hardware does apple use for all of its machine learning training (e.g. for Siri, etc. ) ?

What Apple is really worried about with NVIDIA is vendor lock-in. They own the walled garden, they absolutely are not going to accept an "external dependency" they can't control.

CUDA is such an "external dependency". It locks you in to something that's not an Apple product.

I never quite got how the Apple story was an indictment of NVIDIA. The first-gen RoHS-compliant solders sucked and would fracture... how exactly is that NVIDIA's fault? In fact, wouldn't Apple have been the ones who chose that particular solder?

It is the same issue that caused the Xbox 360 red-ring-of-death, and caused "baking your graphics card" to become a thing (including AMD cards). It basically affected everyone in the industry at the time, and Apple would not have gotten any different outcome from AMD had they been in the hotseat at the time. They were just throwing a tantrum because they're apple damn it and they can't have failures! Must be the supplier's fault.

That one has always struck me as a "bridezilla" story where Apple thinks they're big enough to push their problems onto their suppliers and NVIDIA said no.

And as far as the Xbox thing... Microsoft was demanding a discount and NVIDIA is free to say no. If they wanted a price break partway through the generation, it probably should have been negotiated in the purchase agreements in the first place. NVIDIA needs to turn a profit too and likely structured their financial expectations of the deal in a particular way based on the deal that was signed.

Those are always the go-to "OMG NVIDIA so terrible!" stories and neither of them really strike me as something where NVIDIA did anything particularly wrong.

> Microsoft is the only significant OS vendor with which Nvidia collaborates successfully

Canonical, which ships nvidia's proprietary driver with Ubuntu, is another quite major OS vendor that collaborates with nvidia successfully. Recently, Ubuntu's wayland-based desktop environment was also the first to work with nvidia's driver (the results of this work are open source).

Apple is parting with Intel over quality control issues. That is the same reason why Apple parted with IBM and Motorola that and Intel chips were faster.

You will find ARM Macs are cheaper than Intel Macs, even if not as fast but consume less power due to mobile technology.

Microsoft had the Surface tablet with ARM chips and an ARM version of Windows which didn't sell as well, but then they are not Apple who won't make the same mistakes as Microsoft.

I much prefer it if we focus on NVidia since its the subject matter, rather than go into a pitless discussion

Well if Nvidia acquires ARM, just maybe it will push apple to riscV

Not really. There is nothing any future owner of ARM can do to cut Apple out. Which is why they are not interested in purchasing ARM themselves. They co-developed ARM6 with Acorn and VLSI. Their license allows them to build on to the ARM core. Most Nvidia can do is try to outperform Apple but it will come at a lost of customer that don't need desktop features like GPUs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Architectural...

Whataboutism. All you did was show that Apple is also bad.

No. What I did show is that any multi 10.000 employee FAANG has thousands of projects on flight, some of which are good, some of which are bad.

This contradicts the claim from the OP that suggests that all the projects from one of these companies are all bad.

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