antitrust requires consumer harm. is there any here? nvidia has gotten here by not resting on their laurels as opposed to how others typically do (imho).
Then again, it never "required" consumer harm as far as I've read.
If anything, I would take Nvidia, AMD, and maybe Intel to court for price fixing their GPUs.
Another narrative is that AMD undercuts Nvidia prices because their product isn’t as good.
Worse, Intel then undercuts AMD pricing for video cards because theirs aren’t even as good as AMD’s.
When you get to antitrust, things like this are important. I may agree with you, but an Nvidia lawyer will take this tact and run with it.
Second, what? The drivers for AI work loads on Linux are powering massive models right now.
I think what you actually meant is “I don’t understand antitrust laws or really underlying tech and am mad I can’t game on Linux”
As far as what I read about the driver stack, they only recently (within a year) release source for kernel modules. They did not open source the whole stack. And these are only new modules in an alpha state.
Its basically the bare minimum.
Most people aren't running ML on their workstations and these mostly use entirely different types of cards.
This has zero consumer harm since an insignificant fraction of consumers use Linux.
The harm is in their control of both chip making and e.g. CUDA. The analogy would be Intel refusing to license 8086 and x86 to AMD [1].
[1] https://itigic.com/x86-on-intel-and-amd-why-cant-anyone-else...
How would a significant fraction of consumers use Linux if it's not supported by a monopolist?
edit: also, is the premise even true? Are these compute farms really running windows?
Consumer harm comes when there is intention to control consumer choice. Since Linux isn’t the biggest platform, but a major choice: It is therefor harmful for Nvidia to not support it properly.
Check your bias.
Consumers don't generally rent server space. It would be difficult to establish consumer harm on the basis of server prices.
> Furthermore plenty of people run Linux desktops that would be affected by this
Right, this is the insignificant bit. Inconveniencing 2 or 3% of the market is not a valid antitrust claim [1][2].
> Consumer harm comes when there is intention to control consumer choice
No, it comes when you can prove prices were raised, output reduced, innovation diminished or customers were "otherwise harmed" [3]. To the degree intent is considered in the enabling case, it's in reading the intent of the Congress, not the defendant [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-ame...
[3] https://www.americanactionforum.org/insight/why-the-consumer...
You are also not counting handheld use such as the Steamdeck. There is a reason Steamdeck doesn't use NVIDIA graphics.
GNU/Linux desktop is a different story. Yes it's accurate to say that's an insignificant market share. And I said "GNU" to differentiate from the most popular Linux desktop OS, ChromeOS.
I'm not interested in the OS fan wars and neither is Nvidia, but if you want to consider Linux server users the same as Linux desktop users instead of isolating them, you can count me on that side. I have an RPi, a PowerEdge, an Android phone, and yes an Alpine Linux Docker container on my Mac.
Lack of consumer harm requirement is starting a comeback because it's during monopolization effort, consumers actually benefit from low prices. Once monopoly cements itself, prices tend to skyrocket and quality go down because factors make it very difficult for competitors to emerge.