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This is just a blatant attempt to sell the exact same product to two different types of customers at different prices based on their (presumed) willingness to s
by nightcracker 9y ago
This is just a blatant attempt to sell the exact same product to two different types of customers at different prices based on their (presumed) willingness to spend.
Actually it's worse. It's an attempt to cripple a perfectly functioning cheap product aimed at a different audience (gamers) for another audience (machine learning folks) in order to drive them to more expensive products that do the same thing.
Pure greed.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoYou’re going be surprised how CPUs are price segmented in that case (they’re cut from the same wafers and priced by the clock frequency QA validates at). Price semgnentation isn’t necessarily bad; you want to segment your product in order to maximize revenue across all possible customers; this is just a more egregious/bold attempt at doing so (and is hopefully prevented by a court).
- bubblethink 9y agoNVIDIA already does some form of segmentation with Quadro cards (i.e., artificially crippling things in driver/firmware). They have complete control over firmware, drivers and CUDA. More than the EULA, it's likely that they'll differentiate in software. For eg., CuDNN may stop working on GeForce, or some rubbish like that.
- xigency 9y agoBinning CPUs on clock frequency or number of functioning cores is a bit different. If you compared it to a precious metal, the higher price CPUs have fewer imperfections, therefore they cost more. The fact that they carry different product numbers is a bit misleading but the price segmentation actually makes sense.
- jdietrich 9y agoThe binning is a bit arbitrary, hence overclocking. A large proportion of parts that are binned to a certain clock speed will perform perfectly well at higher clocks. Bins are decided and priced based mostly on marketing rather than fab yields. Intel disable a lot of features on low-end chips, which has nothing to do with yield management. There's no technical reason to disable vPro and Turbo Boost on Core i3 chips.
- gambiting 9y agoWe have both Xeon and i7 workstations in my office and functionally there is no difference, except that the Xeon ones cost 2-3x more. ECC support is not exactly worth it for a normal workstation use.
- phkahler 9y agoSure, but CPU makers don't tell you what software you can run or in what context.
- Veratyr 9y agoWhile I agree it's likely motivated by greed, there is a legitimate reason too: GeForce cards simply aren't made to be run 24/7 in high density server environments. Put 200 of them in a rack and have them running inference or training 24/7 and I suspect you'll see them drop like flies. Tesla cards are explicitly designed for endurance.
- WhitneyLand 9y agoYou are 100% wrong. When that’s the concern, companies add warning labels or warranty limitations. Whether the GeForce cards are less reliable in that environment or not, that is not why the EULA was changed in this way.
- Veratyr 9y agoI don't think you read my comment. I said that they're likely motivated by greed but there _exists_ a legitimate reason too. I didn't say that _is_ their reason, just that it exists.
- jamesblonde 9y agoWe have been running a DeepLearning11 server for a few months now without any problem. I suspect its FUD from Nvidia. If you have fans in your data center actively cooling the cards, you'll be ok. You should use the 1080Ti Founders Edition or Blower card, as they have a single fan that blows air out of the box (in the DL11 setup).
- WhitneyLand 9y agoI read it, and I’m saying there does not exist any legitimate reason to add that language to the EULA. There’s no benefit it provides to addressing the problem of supposed realiability. It’s just almost never the way companies address such issues.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- namlem 9y agoI don't think it's an attempt to cripple the use of their gaming cards so much as it is to cripple the use of their new Titan V.