18 ms·

You are not wrong, but the facts you have cherry picked fail to portrait the whole picture. For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple ha

You are not wrong, but the facts you have cherry picked fail to portrait the whole picture. For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past. The claim that Nintendo is the only company nvidia successfully collaborates with is just wrong: - nvidia manufactures GPU chips, collaborates with dozens of OEMs to ship graphics cards - nvidia collaborates with IBM which ships Power8,9,10 processors all with nvidia technology - nvidia collaborates with OS vendors like microsoft very successfully - nvidia collaborated with mellanox successfully and acquired it - nvidia collaborates with ARM today... The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well... I mean, this is not nvidia specific. You can take any big company, e.g., Apple, and paint a horrible case by cherry picking things (no Vulkan support on MacOSX forcing everyone to use Metal, they don't open source their C++ toolchain, etc.), yet Apple does many good things too (open sourced parts of their toolchain like LLVM, open source swift, etc.). I mean, you even try to paint this as if Nvidia is the only company that Apple has parted ways with, yet Apple has long track record of parting ways with other companies (IBM PowerPC processors, Intel, ...). I'm pretty sure that the moment Apple is able to produce a competitive GFX card, they will part ways with AMD as well.

robert_foss 6y ago
Speaking as a Linux graphics developer, I can confirm that NVidia indeed is a pretty terrible actor. There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing, NVidia knows this. A NVidia purchase of ARM would also create a lot of conflicts of interest.
- fluffything 6y ago
  > There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing I always just assumed that interfacing proprietary IP with the GPL is a tricky legal business. One slip, and all your IP becomes open source. Do you have a source explaining what licensing changes they would have to make and what impact would that have for Linux and Nvidia ? I'd like to read that.
  - kasabali 6y ago
    AMD and Intel had been providing open source drivers for their gpus for long time and they've yet to have had any legal problems with it.
    - wolfgke 6y ago
      Perhaps Nvidia's ASICs and/or firmware contains more legally dubious components. ;-)
    - dathinab 6y ago
      AMD didn't directly open source their driver because if legal issues. The point is it's not about open sourcing your properitary driver but about not getting in the way of an alternative open source driver, maybe even letting it a bit of an have even if just unofficially. I thing if I where nvidea I might go in the direction of having a fully it at least partially open source driver for graphic stuff and a not so open source driver for headless CUDA (potentially running alongside a Intel integrated graphics based head/GUI). Through I don't know what they plan wrt. ARM desktops/servers so this might conflict with their strategies there.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    > I always just assumed that interfacing proprietary IP with the GPL is a tricky legal business. One slip, and all your IP becomes open source. This persistent bit of FUD really needs to die. Yes, you have to be careful, but at this point it's ridiculously well-known what is obviously correct and what is obviously incorrect when dealing with GPL. I'm sure there are some grey ares that haven't been worked out, but avoiding those is fairly simple. Nvidia is already in a weird grey area, releasing binary blobs with an "open source" shim that adapts its interfaces to the GPL kernel. As much as the Linux kernel's pragmatic approach toward licensing helps make it easier on some hardware manufacturers, sometimes I wish they'd take a hard line and refuse to carve out exceptions for binary drivers, inasmuch as those can sometimes/always be considered derived works.
    - dmz73 6y ago
- ngold 6y ago
  And selling for only 32 billion seems really low for a company that significant.
  - leetrout 6y ago
    $18B less than Tiktok (rumored valuation at $50B). That's hard for me to grasp.
    - baq 6y ago
      I don’t want no ads on me CPUs
      - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
        The flawless execution of these instructions has been sponsored by RAID bug spray.
        leeoniya 6y ago
        RAID-5 bug spray, presumably?
        Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
        now with extra parody!
    - jmchuster 6y ago
      How many ARM chips will the average consumer buy in their life? How much profit will ARM make on each of those chips? How many Tiktok videos will the average consumer watch in their life? How much profit will Tiktok make on each of those views?
      - repiret 6y ago
        I have more Arm CPUs in consumer devices within arms reach at this moment than the number of Tiktok videos I’ve seen in my entire life.
- zaphirplane 6y ago
  Out of interest how much work does ARM put into the Linux kernel, OSS compilers, OSS libraries.
  - lambda 6y ago
    Quite a lot. Take a look at a recent snapshot of changesets and lines of code to the Linux kernel contributed by various employers: https://lwn.net/Articles/816162/ https://lwn.net/Articles/816162/ Arm themselves is listed at 1.8% by changesets; but Linaro is a software development shop funded by Arm and other Arm licensees to work on Arm support in various free software, and they contributed 4% of changesets and 8.8% by lines of code. And Code Aurora Forum is an effort to help various hardware vendors, many of whom are Arm vendors, get drivers upstreamed, and they contributed 1.8% by changesets and 10.1% by lines changed. A number of other top companies listed are also Arm licensees, though their support may be for random drivers or other CPU architectures as well. However, Arm and companies in the Arm ecosystem do make up a fairly large amount of the code contributed to Linux, even if much of it is just drivers for random hardware. And Arm and Linaro developers also contribute to GCC, LLVM, Rust, and more.
- dathinab 6y ago
  I think the main question is weather they will "just" own AMD it weather they will absorb it.
nvarsj 6y ago
There’s no defending Nvidia’s approach to Linux and OSS. It is plain awful no matter how you try to twist the reality. And it is actively damaging because it forces extra work on OSS maintainers and frustrates users. You should not be required to install a binary blob in 2020 to get basic functionality (like fan control) to work. Optimus and wayland support is painfully, purposely bad.
- fluffything 6y ago
  > You should not be required to install a binary blob in 2020 to get basic functionality (like fan control) to work. You are not required to do that. Use nouveau, buy an AMD or intel GFX card. You are not entitled to it either. People developing nouveau on their free time don't owe you anything, and nvidia does not owe you an open source driver either. I don't really understand the entitlement here. None of the drivers on my windows and macosx machines are open source. They are all binary blobs. I don't use nvidia GFX cards on linux anymore (intel suffices for my needs), but when I did, I was happy to have a working driver at all. That was a huge upgrade from my previous ATI card, which had no driver at all. Hell, I even tried using AMD's ROCm recently on Linux with a 5700 card, and it wasn't supported at all... I would have been very happy to hear that AMD had a binary driver that made it work, but unfortunately it doesn't. And that was very disappointing because I thought AMD had good open source driver support. At least when buying Nvidia for Linux, you know beforehand that you are going to have to use a proprietary driver, and if that makes you uncomfortable, you can buy just something else.
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    > You are not required to do that. Use nouveau, buy an AMD or intel GFX card. Has internet discussion really fallen this low that all needs to be spelled out and no context can ever be implied? We're in a thread about NVidia, so of course OP's talking about NVidia hardware here. Yeah, they can get AMD, but that does not change their (valid) criticisms of NVidia one bit. > I don't really understand the entitlement here. None of the drivers on my windows and macosx machines are open source. They are all binary blobs. Aaand? Windows and macOS have different standard for drivers than many Linux users do. Is it really that surprising that users who went with an open-source operating system find open-source drivers desirable too? I find it really weird to assume that because something is happening somewhere, it's some kind of an "objective fact of reality" that has to be true for everyone, everywhere. When you shop for things, are you looking for certain features in a product? Would you perhaps suggest in a review that you'd be happier if a product had a certain feature or that you'd be more likely to recommend it? It's the same thing. NVidia is not some lonely developer on GitHub hacking during their lunch break on free software. Do you also assume that the kind of music you find interesting is objectively interesting for everyone? This has nothing to do with entitlement. It's listing reasons for why someone thinks NVidia buying ARM is a bad idea.
modeless 6y ago
Apple didn't part ways with Intel and IBM because they were difficult to work with. They parted ways because Intel and IBM fell behind in performance. Nvidia has certainly not, and Apple has paid a price with worse graphics and machine learning support on Macs since their split. It's clearly different.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  With intel it's a bit more complicated than that. I think running Macs on their own processors is a bit cost saver for them, and allows more control. And intel's CPU shortages have hurt their shipping schedules. I don't think this transition is about CPU performance. But yeah I don't think it's about collaboration either.
- JiNCMG 6y ago
  Correct, IBM didn't care to make a power efficient processor and Motorola didn't see the benefit in Multimedia extension in their processor because they needed them for their network devices. Nvidia introduced a set of laptop GPUs that had a high rate of failure. Instead of working with and eating some of the cost of repairing these laptops they told their customers to deal with it. Apple being one of their customers got upset and left holding the bag of shit and hasn't worked with them since. Intel and AMD have used their x86/AMD64 patents to block Nvidia from entering the x86 CPU market. Nvidia purchasing ARM will hurt not the large ARM licensees like Apple and Samsung but the ones that need to use the CPU in a device that does not need any of the Multimedia extensions that NVidia will be pushing.
DCKing 6y ago
I think the common theme in your examples is that in these situations other parties bend to Nvidia's demands. Nvidia has no problem with other parties bending to their demands. But when another company or organization requires Nvidia to bend to their demands, things go awry almost without exception. EDIT - for added detail: > - nvidia manufactures GPU chips, collaborates with dozens of OEMs to ship graphics cards Most (all?) of which bend to Nvidia's demands because Nvidia's been extremely successful in getting end users to want their chips, making the Nvidia chip a selling point. > - nvidia collaborates with IBM which ships Power8,9,10 processors all with nvidia technology IBM bends to Nvidia's demands so POWER can remain a relevant HPC platform. > - nvidia collaborates with OS vendors like microsoft very successfully Microsoft is the only significant OS vendor with which Nvidia collaborates successfully. It's true - but for the longest time Nvidia would have been out of business if they didn't. I will concede this point, but I don't find this is enough to paint a different picture. > - nvidia collaborated with mellanox successfully and acquired it Mellanox bent over to Nvidia's demands to such an extent that they were acquired. > - nvidia collaborates with ARM today... Collaboration in what sense? My impression is that Nvidia and ARM have a plain passive customer/supplier relationship today. > The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well... Nvidia is humongously behind their competitors Intel and AMD in open source contribution while having a large amount more R&D in graphics. They are terrible at open source compared to the "industry standard" of their market, and only partake as far as it serves their short term needs. They are perfectly entitled to behave this way, by the way. But Nvidia's open source track record is only more evidence is that they don't understand how to work in an open ecosystem, not less. > You can take any big company, e.g., Apple, and paint a horrible case by cherry picking things (no Vulkan support on MacOSX forcing everyone to use Metal, they don't open source their C++ toolchain, etc.), yet Apple does many good things too (open sourced parts of their toolchain like LLVM, open source swift, etc.). The "whataboutism" is valid but completely irrelevant here. I would also not appreciate Apple buying ARM. > For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past. Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM, Motorola, Samsung (SoCs) and PowerVR for technology strategy reasons, not relationship reasons. Apple had no reason to part ways with Nvidia for technical reasons (especially considering they went to AMD instead), but did so because of the terrible relationship they built.
vngzs 6y ago
> The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong [...] Hey! Wait a second, there. Nvidia isn't bad because it has a properietary Linux driver. Nvidia is bad because it actively undermines open-source. Quoting Linus Torvalds (2012) [0]: > I'm also happy to very publicly point out that Nvidia has been one of the worst trouble spots we've had with hardware manufacturers, and that is really sad because then Nvidia tries to sell chips - a lot of chips - into the Android Market. Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with. > [Lifts middle finger] So Nvidia, fuck you. Nvidia managed to push some PR blurbs about how it was improving the open-source driver in 2014, but six years later, Nouveau is still crap compared to their proprietary driver [1]. Drew DeVault, on Nvidia support in Sway [2]: > Nvidia, on the other hand, have been fucking assholes and have treated Linux like utter shit for our entire relationship. About a year ago they announced “Wayland support” for their proprietary driver. This included KMS and DRM support (years late, I might add), but not GBM support. They shipped something called EGLStreams instead, a concept that had been discussed and shot down by the Linux graphics development community before. They did this because it makes it easier for them to keep their driver proprietary without having work with Linux developers on it. Without GBM, Nvidia does not support Wayland, and they were real pricks for making some announcement like they actually did. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ [1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-nouveau-2019&num=2 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-n... [2]: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
- verroq 6y ago
  Which is funny because AMD drivers on linux has been nothing short of trouble (both open source and proprietary) and Nvidia’s blob just works.
  - boogies 6y ago
    [citation needed] My experience directly conflicts with this and IIUC most GNU/Linux users have exactly the opposite impression. Maybe you're thinking of some past situation?
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past. But for entirely different reasons. Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel because the PowerPC processors IBM was offering weren't competitive. They switched from Intel for some combination of the same reason (Intel's performance advantage has eroded) and to bring production in-house, not because Intel was quarrelsome to do business with. Meanwhile Apple refused to do business with nVidia even at a time when they had the unambiguously most performant GPUs.
djmips 6y ago
Whataboutism. All you did was show that Apple is also bad.
- fluffything 6y ago
  No. What I did show is that any multi 10.000 employee FAANG has thousands of projects on flight, some of which are good, some of which are bad. This contradicts the claim from the OP that suggests that all the projects from one of these companies are all bad.
computerex 6y ago
Not agreeing or disagreeing, just want to point out that LLVM was always open source and wasn't developed by Apple. Apple just happened to hire the dev who initially wrote it.
- socialdemocrat 6y ago
  Most LLVM development has to my knowledge been funded by Apple. LLVM and Clang has seen the bulk of their work done on Apple payroll. It is a bit like WebKit. It was based on KHTML which was an open source HTML renderer. But Apple expanded that so greatly on their own payroll that it is hard to call WebKit anything but an Apple product.
  - fluffything 6y ago
    This is not true anymore. Apple funded a significant part of LLVM/Clang work in the 2010s, and then again with the aarch64 backend, but nowadays Google and Intel contribute much more to LLVM than Apple.
- fluffything 6y ago
  Yep. I didn't meant that Apple created LLVM, only that Apple contributes _a lot_ to the open source LLVM project.
stevespang 6y ago
. . . and just like the recent Qualcomm-Apple dispute, courts lean toward insisting on requiring the holder of the patents or the technology license it fairly to others . . seems I recall 15% on patents is fair. I think Nvidia will be fighting a loosing battle in the courts if they aquire ARM and then try to stiff everyone.
ekianjo 6y ago
> The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well... Out of curiosity, is there any large open source product from NVidia? I can't think of any.
- fluffything 6y ago
  Only for their own hardware (RAPIDS, all the cuda libraries, etc.), which other companies like AMD have just forked and modified to work on their hardware keeping the algorithms intact. NVIDIA contributes mostly to existing open source projects (LLVM, Linux kernel, Spark, etc.), see https://developer.nvidia.com/open-source https://developer.nvidia.com/open-source
dnautics 6y ago
Well if Nvidia acquires ARM, just maybe it will push apple to riscV
- JiNCMG 6y ago
  Not really. There is nothing any future owner of ARM can do to cut Apple out. Which is why they are not interested in purchasing ARM themselves. They co-developed ARM6 with Acorn and VLSI. Their license allows them to build on to the ARM core. Most Nvidia can do is try to outperform Apple but it will come at a lost of customer that don't need desktop features like GPUs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Architectural_licence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Architectural...
cable2600 6y ago
Apple is parting with Intel over quality control issues. That is the same reason why Apple parted with IBM and Motorola that and Intel chips were faster. You will find ARM Macs are cheaper than Intel Macs, even if not as fast but consume less power due to mobile technology. Microsoft had the Surface tablet with ARM chips and an ARM version of Windows which didn't sell as well, but then they are not Apple who won't make the same mistakes as Microsoft.
idclip 6y ago
I much prefer it if we focus on NVidia since its the subject matter, rather than go into a pitless discussion

robert_foss 6y ago

Speaking as a Linux graphics developer, I can confirm that NVidia indeed is a pretty terrible actor. There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing, NVidia knows this. A NVidia purchase of ARM would also create a lot of conflicts of interest.

fluffything 6y ago
> There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing I always just assumed that interfacing proprietary IP with the GPL is a tricky legal business. One slip, and all your IP becomes open source. Do you have a source explaining what licensing changes they would have to make and what impact would that have for Linux and Nvidia ? I'd like to read that.
- kasabali 6y ago
  AMD and Intel had been providing open source drivers for their gpus for long time and they've yet to have had any legal problems with it.
  - wolfgke 6y ago
    Perhaps Nvidia's ASICs and/or firmware contains more legally dubious components. ;-)
  - dathinab 6y ago
    AMD didn't directly open source their driver because if legal issues. The point is it's not about open sourcing your properitary driver but about not getting in the way of an alternative open source driver, maybe even letting it a bit of an have even if just unofficially. I thing if I where nvidea I might go in the direction of having a fully it at least partially open source driver for graphic stuff and a not so open source driver for headless CUDA (potentially running alongside a Intel integrated graphics based head/GUI). Through I don't know what they plan wrt. ARM desktops/servers so this might conflict with their strategies there.
- kelnos 6y ago
  > I always just assumed that interfacing proprietary IP with the GPL is a tricky legal business. One slip, and all your IP becomes open source. This persistent bit of FUD really needs to die. Yes, you have to be careful, but at this point it's ridiculously well-known what is obviously correct and what is obviously incorrect when dealing with GPL. I'm sure there are some grey ares that haven't been worked out, but avoiding those is fairly simple. Nvidia is already in a weird grey area, releasing binary blobs with an "open source" shim that adapts its interfaces to the GPL kernel. As much as the Linux kernel's pragmatic approach toward licensing helps make it easier on some hardware manufacturers, sometimes I wish they'd take a hard line and refuse to carve out exceptions for binary drivers, inasmuch as those can sometimes/always be considered derived works.
  - dmz73 6y ago
ngold 6y ago
And selling for only 32 billion seems really low for a company that significant.
- leetrout 6y ago
  $18B less than Tiktok (rumored valuation at $50B). That's hard for me to grasp.
  - baq 6y ago
    I don’t want no ads on me CPUs
    - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
      The flawless execution of these instructions has been sponsored by RAID bug spray.
      - leeoniya 6y ago
        RAID-5 bug spray, presumably?
        Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
        now with extra parody!
  - jmchuster 6y ago
    How many ARM chips will the average consumer buy in their life? How much profit will ARM make on each of those chips? How many Tiktok videos will the average consumer watch in their life? How much profit will Tiktok make on each of those views?
    - repiret 6y ago
      I have more Arm CPUs in consumer devices within arms reach at this moment than the number of Tiktok videos I’ve seen in my entire life.
zaphirplane 6y ago
Out of interest how much work does ARM put into the Linux kernel, OSS compilers, OSS libraries.
- lambda 6y ago
  Quite a lot. Take a look at a recent snapshot of changesets and lines of code to the Linux kernel contributed by various employers: https://lwn.net/Articles/816162/ https://lwn.net/Articles/816162/ Arm themselves is listed at 1.8% by changesets; but Linaro is a software development shop funded by Arm and other Arm licensees to work on Arm support in various free software, and they contributed 4% of changesets and 8.8% by lines of code. And Code Aurora Forum is an effort to help various hardware vendors, many of whom are Arm vendors, get drivers upstreamed, and they contributed 1.8% by changesets and 10.1% by lines changed. A number of other top companies listed are also Arm licensees, though their support may be for random drivers or other CPU architectures as well. However, Arm and companies in the Arm ecosystem do make up a fairly large amount of the code contributed to Linux, even if much of it is just drivers for random hardware. And Arm and Linaro developers also contribute to GCC, LLVM, Rust, and more.
dathinab 6y ago
I think the main question is weather they will "just" own AMD it weather they will absorb it.

nvarsj 6y ago

There’s no defending Nvidia’s approach to Linux and OSS. It is plain awful no matter how you try to twist the reality. And it is actively damaging because it forces extra work on OSS maintainers and frustrates users. You should not be required to install a binary blob in 2020 to get basic functionality (like fan control) to work. Optimus and wayland support is painfully, purposely bad.

fluffything 6y ago
> You should not be required to install a binary blob in 2020 to get basic functionality (like fan control) to work. You are not required to do that. Use nouveau, buy an AMD or intel GFX card. You are not entitled to it either. People developing nouveau on their free time don't owe you anything, and nvidia does not owe you an open source driver either. I don't really understand the entitlement here. None of the drivers on my windows and macosx machines are open source. They are all binary blobs. I don't use nvidia GFX cards on linux anymore (intel suffices for my needs), but when I did, I was happy to have a working driver at all. That was a huge upgrade from my previous ATI card, which had no driver at all. Hell, I even tried using AMD's ROCm recently on Linux with a 5700 card, and it wasn't supported at all... I would have been very happy to hear that AMD had a binary driver that made it work, but unfortunately it doesn't. And that was very disappointing because I thought AMD had good open source driver support. At least when buying Nvidia for Linux, you know beforehand that you are going to have to use a proprietary driver, and if that makes you uncomfortable, you can buy just something else.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  > You are not required to do that. Use nouveau, buy an AMD or intel GFX card. Has internet discussion really fallen this low that all needs to be spelled out and no context can ever be implied? We're in a thread about NVidia, so of course OP's talking about NVidia hardware here. Yeah, they can get AMD, but that does not change their (valid) criticisms of NVidia one bit. > I don't really understand the entitlement here. None of the drivers on my windows and macosx machines are open source. They are all binary blobs. Aaand? Windows and macOS have different standard for drivers than many Linux users do. Is it really that surprising that users who went with an open-source operating system find open-source drivers desirable too? I find it really weird to assume that because something is happening somewhere, it's some kind of an "objective fact of reality" that has to be true for everyone, everywhere. When you shop for things, are you looking for certain features in a product? Would you perhaps suggest in a review that you'd be happier if a product had a certain feature or that you'd be more likely to recommend it? It's the same thing. NVidia is not some lonely developer on GitHub hacking during their lunch break on free software. Do you also assume that the kind of music you find interesting is objectively interesting for everyone? This has nothing to do with entitlement. It's listing reasons for why someone thinks NVidia buying ARM is a bad idea.

modeless 6y ago

Apple didn't part ways with Intel and IBM because they were difficult to work with. They parted ways because Intel and IBM fell behind in performance. Nvidia has certainly not, and Apple has paid a price with worse graphics and machine learning support on Macs since their split. It's clearly different.

GekkePrutser 6y ago
With intel it's a bit more complicated than that. I think running Macs on their own processors is a bit cost saver for them, and allows more control. And intel's CPU shortages have hurt their shipping schedules. I don't think this transition is about CPU performance. But yeah I don't think it's about collaboration either.
JiNCMG 6y ago
Correct, IBM didn't care to make a power efficient processor and Motorola didn't see the benefit in Multimedia extension in their processor because they needed them for their network devices. Nvidia introduced a set of laptop GPUs that had a high rate of failure. Instead of working with and eating some of the cost of repairing these laptops they told their customers to deal with it. Apple being one of their customers got upset and left holding the bag of shit and hasn't worked with them since. Intel and AMD have used their x86/AMD64 patents to block Nvidia from entering the x86 CPU market. Nvidia purchasing ARM will hurt not the large ARM licensees like Apple and Samsung but the ones that need to use the CPU in a device that does not need any of the Multimedia extensions that NVidia will be pushing.

DCKing 6y ago

I think the common theme in your examples is that in these situations other parties bend to Nvidia's demands. Nvidia has no problem with other parties bending to their demands. But when another company or organization requires Nvidia to bend to their demands, things go awry almost without exception. EDIT - for added detail: > - nvidia manufactures GPU chips, collaborates with dozens of OEMs to ship graphics cards Most (all?) of which bend to Nvidia's demands because Nvidia's been extremely successful in getting end users to want their chips, making the Nvidia chip a selling point. > - nvidia collaborates with IBM which ships Power8,9,10 processors all with nvidia technology IBM bends to Nvidia's demands so POWER can remain a relevant HPC platform. > - nvidia collaborates with OS vendors like microsoft very successfully Microsoft is the only significant OS vendor with which Nvidia collaborates successfully. It's true - but for the longest time Nvidia would have been out of business if they didn't. I will concede this point, but I don't find this is enough to paint a different picture. > - nvidia collaborated with mellanox successfully and acquired it Mellanox bent over to Nvidia's demands to such an extent that they were acquired. > - nvidia collaborates with ARM today... Collaboration in what sense? My impression is that Nvidia and ARM have a plain passive customer/supplier relationship today. > The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well... Nvidia is humongously behind their competitors Intel and AMD in open source contribution while having a large amount more R&D in graphics. They are terrible at open source compared to the "industry standard" of their market, and only partake as far as it serves their short term needs. They are perfectly entitled to behave this way, by the way. But Nvidia's open source track record is only more evidence is that they don't understand how to work in an open ecosystem, not less. > You can take any big company, e.g., Apple, and paint a horrible case by cherry picking things (no Vulkan support on MacOSX forcing everyone to use Metal, they don't open source their C++ toolchain, etc.), yet Apple does many good things too (open sourced parts of their toolchain like LLVM, open source swift, etc.). The "whataboutism" is valid but completely irrelevant here. I would also not appreciate Apple buying ARM. > For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past. Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM, Motorola, Samsung (SoCs) and PowerVR for technology strategy reasons, not relationship reasons. Apple had no reason to part ways with Nvidia for technical reasons (especially considering they went to AMD instead), but did so because of the terrible relationship they built.

vngzs 6y ago

> The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong [...] Hey! Wait a second, there. Nvidia isn't bad because it has a properietary Linux driver. Nvidia is bad because it actively undermines open-source. Quoting Linus Torvalds (2012) [0]: > I'm also happy to very publicly point out that Nvidia has been one of the worst trouble spots we've had with hardware manufacturers, and that is really sad because then Nvidia tries to sell chips - a lot of chips - into the Android Market. Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with. > [Lifts middle finger] So Nvidia, fuck you. Nvidia managed to push some PR blurbs about how it was improving the open-source driver in 2014, but six years later, Nouveau is still crap compared to their proprietary driver [1]. Drew DeVault, on Nvidia support in Sway [2]: > Nvidia, on the other hand, have been fucking assholes and have treated Linux like utter shit for our entire relationship. About a year ago they announced “Wayland support” for their proprietary driver. This included KMS and DRM support (years late, I might add), but not GBM support. They shipped something called EGLStreams instead, a concept that had been discussed and shot down by the Linux graphics development community before. They did this because it makes it easier for them to keep their driver proprietary without having work with Linux developers on it. Without GBM, Nvidia does not support Wayland, and they were real pricks for making some announcement like they actually did. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ [1]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-nouveau-2019&num=2 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-n... [2]: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

verroq 6y ago
Which is funny because AMD drivers on linux has been nothing short of trouble (both open source and proprietary) and Nvidia’s blob just works.
- boogies 6y ago
  [citation needed] My experience directly conflicts with this and IIUC most GNU/Linux users have exactly the opposite impression. Maybe you're thinking of some past situation?

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past. But for entirely different reasons. Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel because the PowerPC processors IBM was offering weren't competitive. They switched from Intel for some combination of the same reason (Intel's performance advantage has eroded) and to bring production in-house, not because Intel was quarrelsome to do business with. Meanwhile Apple refused to do business with nVidia even at a time when they had the unambiguously most performant GPUs.

djmips 6y ago

Whataboutism. All you did was show that Apple is also bad.

fluffything 6y ago
No. What I did show is that any multi 10.000 employee FAANG has thousands of projects on flight, some of which are good, some of which are bad. This contradicts the claim from the OP that suggests that all the projects from one of these companies are all bad.

computerex 6y ago

Not agreeing or disagreeing, just want to point out that LLVM was always open source and wasn't developed by Apple. Apple just happened to hire the dev who initially wrote it.

socialdemocrat 6y ago
Most LLVM development has to my knowledge been funded by Apple. LLVM and Clang has seen the bulk of their work done on Apple payroll. It is a bit like WebKit. It was based on KHTML which was an open source HTML renderer. But Apple expanded that so greatly on their own payroll that it is hard to call WebKit anything but an Apple product.
- fluffything 6y ago
  This is not true anymore. Apple funded a significant part of LLVM/Clang work in the 2010s, and then again with the aarch64 backend, but nowadays Google and Intel contribute much more to LLVM than Apple.
fluffything 6y ago
Yep. I didn't meant that Apple created LLVM, only that Apple contributes _a lot_ to the open source LLVM project.

stevespang 6y ago

. . . and just like the recent Qualcomm-Apple dispute, courts lean toward insisting on requiring the holder of the patents or the technology license it fairly to others . . seems I recall 15% on patents is fair. I think Nvidia will be fighting a loosing battle in the courts if they aquire ARM and then try to stiff everyone.

ekianjo 6y ago

> The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well... Out of curiosity, is there any large open source product from NVidia? I can't think of any.

fluffything 6y ago
Only for their own hardware (RAPIDS, all the cuda libraries, etc.), which other companies like AMD have just forked and modified to work on their hardware keeping the algorithms intact. NVIDIA contributes mostly to existing open source projects (LLVM, Linux kernel, Spark, etc.), see https://developer.nvidia.com/open-source https://developer.nvidia.com/open-source

dnautics 6y ago

Well if Nvidia acquires ARM, just maybe it will push apple to riscV

JiNCMG 6y ago
Not really. There is nothing any future owner of ARM can do to cut Apple out. Which is why they are not interested in purchasing ARM themselves. They co-developed ARM6 with Acorn and VLSI. Their license allows them to build on to the ARM core. Most Nvidia can do is try to outperform Apple but it will come at a lost of customer that don't need desktop features like GPUs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Architectural_licence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Architectural...

cable2600 6y ago

Apple is parting with Intel over quality control issues. That is the same reason why Apple parted with IBM and Motorola that and Intel chips were faster. You will find ARM Macs are cheaper than Intel Macs, even if not as fast but consume less power due to mobile technology. Microsoft had the Surface tablet with ARM chips and an ARM version of Windows which didn't sell as well, but then they are not Apple who won't make the same mistakes as Microsoft.

idclip 6y ago

I much prefer it if we focus on NVidia since its the subject matter, rather than go into a pitless discussion