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Comment by TechBro8615 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Nvidia puts so much effort into keeping their drivers as proprietary blobs. It's not like their software is part of their defensibility; they're a hardware company. Not only will opening their kernel modules have zero impact on their hardware sales, but it will actually improve their stability and also earn goodwill from developers who might otherwise go out of their way to purchase a GPU from AMD.

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They want to be more than a hardware company, because commodification is antithetical to fat profit margins. They have ~80% of the GPU market, their only way to increase profit margins is to start gouging (which is easier if they control the stack higher up, e.g. if the main GPGPU language is built around their GPU architecture) or to branch into a different field entirely (which is why Nvidia has been going so hard into AI - they could leverage their GPU dominance to gain an early lead in the field).

My guess is that it would enable unlocking higher performance regimes in lower-end cards. But I have nothing to back that up with.

Their software is a huge part of their defensibility

How?

CUDA is the basis for the entire “AI revolution.” Their entire stock price now is from the extreme demand for A100/H100 to power AI and other supercomputing needs. That’s possible because the software stack (CUDA drivers, etc) are incredibly powerful at turning the silicon into value. AMD also has ok hardware, but almost no adoption due to software. If they give up the software the huge advantage they have will erode.

I'm skeptical of the argument that Nvidia's superiority to AMD is due to their software. But even if it were, what would AMD gain by having access to the source code of Nvidia drivers? It's not like they can use it to speed up their own chips.

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