What incentive would Nvidia have to develop new ARM features that would assist competitors in competing with them?
The Fujitsu's A64FX Processor for example somewhat competes with Nvidia datacenter GPUs. What incentive would Nvidia have to continue to develop the Arm Scalable Vector Extension?
The only good thing from this sale would be the pivot to RISC-V.
Nvidia is a castle because of the moats they've built. Not because they're leaps and bounds ahead in terms of silicon and technical wizardry. They shunned OpenCL, they'll probably shun Vulkan for GPGPU and make sure that people are locked to CUDA and its ecosystem. They have no intention to play fair.
We're going to see how Mellanox will evolve under their command.
[0]:https://www.reddit.com/r/realAMD/comments/qujwas/amd_drops_o...
this comment is factually untrue and anyone can check it for themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#Conformant_products
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan#Intel,_Nvidia_and_AMD
it would be absolutely insane not to support either of those features. An absolute shit-ton of games use Vulkan these days, there is zero chance of that being deprecated in any timespan not measured in decades. Everyone is still supporting OpenGL after all, and that's like what, an early 90s API?
there is a larger point to be made here about some of the reflexively negative responses people have when the N-word is brought up. There are certainly criticisms you can make of NVIDIA, but people have this intense and reflexively negative emotional response that tends to slide these discussions into flamewar territory.
I know I'm about to hear about how Linus gave them the finger (cause he's a totally balanced and wholesome person), but providing a closed-source linux driver and not supporting wayland (which I think they did eventually anyway?) aren't the end of the world like people make them out to be. Pick the product that fits your needs, if not move on, you don't need to become emotionally attached and you can keep your positions fact-based.
I agree that it's my mistake, however there was a gap between this support periods and levels, and I've been burned by nVidia's own driver on an nVidia 800 series card. It's not out of spite or prejudice. I stand corrected, but my experience also stands. Also nVidia's practices for treating technologies they don't like is still valid.
Also, being compatible doesn't mean that these technologies are first class citizens on the driver/hardware level, and they may not be allowed to use the card up to its full potential.
> it would be absolutely insane not to support either of those features. An absolute shit-ton of games use Vulkan these days, there is zero chance of that being deprecated in any timespan not measured in decades. Everyone is still supporting OpenGL after all, and that's like what, an early 90s API?
There's support and there's support. I'm not talking about games and graphics stuff. I was doing some research about nVidia's "Vulkan Compute" support, and seen this:
"Vulkan compute on AMD and Intel might be okay but we already know of ways Nvidia puts the clamp on Vulkan compute (doesn't make use of multiple DMAs for transfer) and given their history with OpenCL and the vested interest they have in developers preferring CUDA, they're really not to be trusted." [0][1]
The guy writing seems to know what he's talking about (reading about the history gives a lot of nice low level details about how these things work), and this is what I was exactly saying about "Ditching Vulkan Compute in favor of CUDA, like OpenCL". "Yeah, it's supported, but it might not be fast, sorry."
> there is a larger point to be made here about some of the reflexively negative responses people have when the N-word is brought up. There are certainly criticisms you can make of NVIDIA, but people have this intense and reflexively negative emotional response that tends to slide these discussions into flamewar territory.
I'm personally no fan of flamewars. I also don't like to disseminate wrong information knowingly (see above). Also, I work in a HPC center where we use nVidia hardware, and personally develop scientific software. So, I'm not distant to either tiers of nVidia hardware. So, maybe not having prejudice about people one's replying to the first time is a good thing, no?
> I know I'm about to hear about how Linus gave them the finger (cause he's a totally balanced and wholesome person)...
No, you're not.
TL;DR: You can't write multi-vendor, GPU acceleration code which uses every card to its highest potential, even if there's standards. You need to write at least two copies of the code, one being CUDA. Why? nVidia doesn't like other technologies to work as fast on their cards. That's it.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/vulkan/comments/jwhnfe/comment/gcq5...
For example, if you look at the TOP500, #1 (A64FX) gets about 14.78 TFLOP/watt, #5 (EPYC/A100) gets 27.37 TFLOP/watt. Most of the A100 based solutions are similar performance per watt. Nvidia is already beating ARM in power efficiency. This looks closer to the 3dfx acquisition from Nvidia's prospective.
> The Fujitsu's A64FX Processor for example somewhat competes with Nvidia datacenter GPUs. What incentive would Nvidia have to continue to develop the Arm Scalable Vector Extension?
"the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
the more R&D that goes into the ARM ecosystem, the tougher things get for x86. At the end of the day, all that R&D spending is making NVIDIA's position stronger, it's a force multiplier for their own efforts.
I fundamentally don't understand why anyone would think the ARM acquisition was about anything other than making Jensen kingmaker over one of the two most important processor IPs in the world - and he gains absolutely nothing by becoming king and then slaying all his subjects. That would be an amazingly shortsighted decision from one of the most far-sighted tech CEOs in the business.
Selling some more Tegras is peanuts in comparison and that bump would never last in the long term. The money is in Qualcomm and Fujitsu and IBM's R&D budgets working in synergy with your own, and in the ability to leverage the ARM licensing model to push CUDA into the last places it hasn't reached.
The fact that NVIDIA was even making this offer at all pretty much means they were looking at loosening up their IP licensing IMO. As a black box, sure, but I don't see a world in which NVIDIA would buy ARM and either not license GeForce as the graphics IP, or would choose not to license ARM at all ("selling a few more Tegras is not worth $40b"). If you accept those two givens, then NVIDIA would have had to provide GeForce IP as a black-box SIP license.
This is the cultural difference between ARM and Nvidia.
ARM does care enough about their IP that you'll need to pay them for ARM's effort to develop their IP, but beyond that they will not restrict you unless it'll put ARM into legal trouble (basically export restrictions). Hey, you could get everything now with a one-time license payment if you are willing to do that. It's not FSF open, but it's certainly better than a lot of hardware companies.
Nvidia is trying to extract everything into each pipeline. You want to use their hardware? You have to agree to only use this to precise conditions that is purely for market segmentation, which conflicts with ARM's culture. Compounding this with the fact that almost all acquisitions done by Nvidia that was more open was closed down (try talking to Nvidia about Mellanox), if the ARM acquisition proceeded, it'll be a bad day for everyone else.
F*** Oracle definitely, they can't even bother to have a proper SystemD service on systems which uses SystemD, relying on scripts that are definitely not redeeming them.
ARM makes prototype designs that you can extend, M1 is an absolute success of that model.
Regardless: you say they've failed as a business, your metric is how much they earn from being nearly everywhere.
I would pointedly disagree: they're everywhere, that's success, they're everywhere and profitable. There's absolutely no need to rent seek... this is unsustainable capitalist thinking.
They're able to innovate and turn a profit with their "modest" income, why do you need them to do more than that? How do you know they would do better with more money?
Intel (yes, apple to oranges) has many orders of magnitude more money, but most of it goes into bureaucracies.
See also: Microsoft, Oracle
Do you think that once they IPO pressure from their stockholders will cause rent seeking behavior? Even if they sold to nvidia frankly.
B: "it is a failure as a business. If you employed underhand tactics you could be even bigger!"
This is the phylosophy that gives us DRM on cars, 100 page lisence agreement with TVs, and fraud on wallstreet.
Obviously not true, but I can see how some might think this if their main comparators are companies that get to $1trn valuations in 30 years. Not every company can or should be a FAANG.
To be fair, AMD does super annoying lock in/binning things too, though not with software locking.
For example, there was a Radeon that would have been a crazy awesome server rack mounted GPU for Deep learning 4U blades. You couldn't put it in a server because it was mounted on a chassis that was 4mm too large for PCI spec.
(Btw I hate hate hate Nvidia so this is not pointless whataboutism)
They also have moved to locking their CPUs to the motherboards, to restrict second-hand sales of surplus CPUs/etc. So far it's only locked to the brand, so you can put it in any Dell system but only a dell system, but it's still sufficient to cause a huge amount of headaches for the surplus sector. I was looking at some cheap Epyc 7402Ps on ebay until I saw... "locked to dell, only runs on Dell". Welp. And the other cheap listing, is that one locked too? Who knows, and that's the point AMD is going for, they just have to inject enough uncertainty to change consumer behavior. Most people aren't going to be willing to trace the provenance of a used CPU, they will just pay 20% more for a new one. A limited number will be sold as complete systems, but as the market shrinks and people stop considering secondhand purchases, eventually they will just be thrown in the trash. Mission accomplished.
And that's coming for consumer CPUs too. It's already here for AMD's "ryzen pro" desktop line, it won't be long until it hits walmart prebuilts too.
That's not "the point". The purpose of the feature is legitimate, but you're right that the consequences suck hard for the second hand market.
The thing you're talking about is a security feature where the CPU would be locked to only boot when the firmware is signed by a particular signing key. If you're a high-value target such as a cloud vendor or a government / military, attacks on the firmware are a legitimate threat, and this ensures that the firmware cannot be silently tampered with. This is a big deal to them and that's the reason why AMD implemented this.
But yes, most people don't need or want this. It's entirely optional, it's supposed to be something the customer configures, but Lenovo turned it on by default. Pressure needs to be put on Lenovo to stop doing so.
It is not other people's say unfortunately.
And a bad track record of preventing interoperability and cross-vendor standardization, to lock customers in.
It doesn't matter, as the damage is done.
Once the industry caught a whiff of NVIDIA's intent to purchase ARM, they looked for alternatives. That's RISC-V.
Today, it's been years and the RISC-V efforts within the industry have advanced considerably. These won't be dropped now, irrespective of ARM's fate.