If Arm plan to drop Mali completely, to be replaced by something from Nvidia, this could be an early step to washing their hands of driver itself.
Edit: That was a bit cynical. More charitably, open sourcing the driver under these circumstances would allow the community to continue to use and support Mali even if Arm were looking to discontinue it.
I want to believe this is some mid-level employee going rouge trying to salvage what they can before the inevitable rent seeking :D.
You know how everyone hates Qualcomm because they more or less pushed every other SoC vendor out of the market with aggressive patent licensing terms? Imagine that but worse.
Making Tegra competing with say Mediatek doesn't gain Nvidia much.
Stop Licensing ARM would put $40 Billion down the drain. ( Arguably it is only $12 Billion cash with stocks )
I also dont see Nintendo have problem working with Nvidia.
That doesn't mean Nvidia is good or bad. I just dont see how Nvidia's interest, ARM Interest, and most people ( including on HN ) 's interest align.
Because the amount of partnerships nVidia has kinda makes your point suspect.
Possible? Yes. Likely? I doubt it. Just look at nvidia's past behavior with Linux.
I have been there, on both teams. I've helped nudging one of them to their current position.
nVidia was not like this in 2010s. Their drivers were spotless, performant and specs conformant. Things went very downhill with the rise of CUDA. Since CUDA became a compute monopoly, nVidia didn't feel the need to play by the books. The undercut OpenCL agressively. Drivers' code quality went downhill. Tesla got the priority and desktop support went downhill.
I have a friend who's developing a game engine. He praised nVidia's debugging tools and utilities and swears to their drivers on any platform. Flags got ignored, code does what it wants, not what it's told to do. Commands replaced in terms of automatic optimization... It's just a black box which does something convoluted to make things work. I'm not talking about game/app/binary specific optimizations. I'm talking about standards compliant, run of the mill code.
There's nothing left of the nVidia of 2010s. They became greedy, blind, uncaring and devastating. They were the days, when the green team was the savior of 3D on the Linux Boxen. Time has moved, that ship has sailed. Red team redesigned their silicon just for open drivers. Intel started publishing well functioning open source drivers. nVidia became the dominant player in the Compute & AI segment, and they left the GPU/Desktop/OpenGL field behind.
Hmm, you mean like nVidia being the only company providing fully featured 3D support for more than 2 decades before the Linux kernel team decided they'll start demanding one-sided changes from them?
I distincly remember years and years of using Linux on desktop where nVidia was the only hope of getting the same OGL features than Windows users were getting. Even when Linux was an irrelevant blip on everyones radar.
They're not supporting Linux out of good will. They're doing it because it's making them money. There are probably lots of people running rendering servers out there on top of Linux. Those are nvidia's real customers.
Merging is n-1 thus reducing competition.
Can you explain how merging two companies and thus removing a competitor leads to good competition?
If Nvidia ARM machines become something that first-tier server vendors make available, there will indeed be competition in places there there isn't presently.