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I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple wo

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) But, on the plus side, it's the biggest opportunity RISC-V will ever get. Almost overnight anyone who was building ARM cores will suddenly see investments in RISC-V prudent as a hedge against nVidia's future core designs not being licenseable. SiFive will very quickly become a multi-billion dollar organization...

mud_dauber 6y ago
"nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others": can you elaborate or mention an example? That aspect has escaped me thus far.
- foota 6y ago
  CUDA is probably the biggest thing here, also I don't think they open source much.
  - rl3 6y ago
    >... also I don't think they open source much. You could say that: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
  - shaklee3 6y ago
    This is increasingly becoming not true. See cutlass and the new release of cufftdx.
    - ris 6y ago
      These are both things that are unlikely to ever be able to run on anything other than nvidia hardware. It's hardly a mark in their favour over abusive lock-in practices.
      - shaklee3 6y ago
        Well, of course. They're written in cuda. Why would Nvidia try to write it in a language like opencl that even AMD is moving away from, and instead making fft/blas library calls? At least the source code is there if you wanted to port it.
        ris 6y ago
        I think it's very clear that I wasn't commenting on what framework they choose to write their projects in, and you're rather deliberately missing my point.
        shaklee3 6y ago
        > These are both things that are unlikely to ever be able to run on anything other than nvidia hardware. I think it's very clear that the framework was important here. Because you were pointing out that they don't open source much, I pointed out that they do, then you nitpicked by saying it's cuda.
  - tasty_freeze 6y ago
    I had no idea, so I just searched and found there are 201 repositories in their github: https://github.com/NVIDIA https://github.com/NVIDIA
    - asddubs 6y ago
      that's a pretty meaningless number without further context
      - tasty_freeze 6y ago
        The person I replied to said nvidia doesn't contribute much to open source. I pointed at their github repositories. If you care about the context, it is there, and there is no risk of me summarizing it unfairly.
        andoriyu 6y ago
        Having some of your code in github isn't contributing to open source.
- numakerg 6y ago
  I recall the GeForce Partner Program raised some controversy, although I couldn't say whether or it was bad or good or why. There's also the issue with them refusing to open source Linux drivers. Supposedly this is because they throttle workstation GPUs to create a market for higher-end versions while reducing the manufacturing diversity, but I haven't heard a definitive source for this.
  - bonzini 6y ago
    > they throttle workstation GPUs Not sure about this, but they definitely prevent the loading of drivers for GeForce cards if they detect a hypervisor (Quadro cards work). Nvidia claims that it's a bug, and that they're not fixing it only because GeForce cards are not sold to be run in virtual machines. At the very least it's a dubious claim since for a short time there was an arms race as workarounds were figured out and the next version of the driver would detect them... Of course it's market segmentation by obscurity so it only lasted a few weeks and it's trivial to work around, but still it's quite shady since there's absolutely no ill effect from the work around.
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      It is absolutely not a bug, Disassembly of NVIDIA drivers shows that its looking for specific KVM signatures, and if you modify those signatures, magically it starts working again...
      - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
        Removing KVM signature is now the standard solution. But there's still a working driver patch to remove the virtualization check, it's available at here. * sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher: Fixes "Bug" in Nvidia Driver preventing "Unsupported Configurations" from being used on KVM https://github.com/sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher https://github.com/sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher
      - bonzini 6y ago
        Of course it's not a bug. :-)
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  This sentiment comes entirely from their lack of open source drivers for Linux. It became pretty much a meme after a rant that Linus had about them in 2012.
- 9935c101ab17a66 6y ago
  There was the apple gpu fiasco. Apple laptop GPUs were failing at an extraordinary rate in 2010-2011, and Apple were getting harangued in the media about it (which was justified). Apple eventually announced a program to cover replacement of the GPUs, but it was very delayed. I'm 100% convinced the delay was caused by Nvidia refusing to accept responsibility. When the program was released, in order to have the repair completed at no cost, your computer had to fail a very specific graphics diagnostic, and the failure would be linked to your serial number in Apple's repair CRM. At the time, no other apple repair program had this requirement — Don't get me wrong, it makes sense to use diagnostics to verify hardware issues, but they aren't the only tool you can use. I'm convinced Nvidia only would reimburse apple for computers that had a recorded failure of this specific test. Since 2014, apple has almost exclusively used AMD graphics cards in computers that do have discrete GPUs, and I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest this was motivated with their terrible experience with Nvidia. (I'm aware I'm not really backing this up with evidence, but I think the publicly available facts about the whole situation support this narrative)
  - karlshea 6y ago
    That situation was also following Nvidia spoiling one of Steve Jobs' announcements even further back, so there was already a bit of bad blood.
    - 9935c101ab17a66 6y ago
      Good point, I had forgotten about that.
      - andoriyu 6y ago
        Which one was that?
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Don't get me wrong, it makes sense to use diagnostics to verify hardware issues, but they aren't the only tool you can use. I'm convinced Nvidia only would reimburse apple for computers that had a recorded failure of this specific test. In 2010, Apple wasn’t exactly a beleaguered company. It wasn’t like NVidia not reimbursing Apple would break the bank. Apple should have repaired it just to protect its reputation. Jobs himself was famous for saying to high level employees that at a certain level of authority, you don’t get to make excuses.
- awalton 6y ago
  Google it maybe? Here's one example thread to pull at: why did Apple stop buying nVidia GPUs across their entire hardware line? EGLStreams is a recent pain in the ass. nVidia's infanticide of OpenCL with CUDA being another painful reminder that nVidia doesn't care about your software needs, just their own. It's really not hard to find a company that nVidia's pissed off with its dealings.
  - rrss 6y ago
    If there was an infanticide of OpenCL, Apple (the original creator of OpenCL) was at least as responsible as Nvidia.
- johnklos 6y ago
  NVIDIA can compete based on the superior performance of their products, but that's not enough. They try to attempt lock-in by encouraging software writers to use CUDA and not use OpenCL. In many projects that support both, OpenCL and CUDA often give similar performance, and in some, OpenCL is faster than CUDA. So CUDA isn't about getting more performance - it's about excluding everything non-NVIDIA. I suspect that NVIDIA's gameplaying is what led to Apple deciding to not use NVIDIA in any Macs for the last several years.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    They don't need to do any lock-in when the choice is between plain old C with printf like debugging, and a set of programming languages able to target PTX, with out of the box support for C, C++, Fortran and several managed languages, and nice graphical debugging tools. C++ support only came to OpenCL after it was clear to Khronos that it was time to move beyond C only vision of the world, yet almost no one bothered to implement OpenCL 2.x, which is why OpenCL 3.0 is basically OpenCL 1.2 to make all those OEM compliant, and SYCL is now moving into an backend agnostic C++ stack. So the competition did not move a finger to make OpenCL eco-system beat CUDA tooling, Google did not cared one second to make OpenCL available on Android instead pushed for their own Renderscript C99 dialect, but it is easy to blame NVidia when competition isn't up to their stuff. Just like Apple, after creating OpenCL and offering it to Khronos, moved away from their own creation after disputes on how OpenCL roadmap should be managed. Ironically, just like with CUDA, Metal Compute happens to be multiple language aware and having a modern API.
    - cpgxiii 6y ago
      The problem with OpenCL, just like OpenGL, is that it relies on vendor support for essentially the full stack. That means if a single vendor doesn't support the feature, it's basically impossible to ship any code that uses that feature to arbitrary users. Nvidia lagging behind in its support for OpenCL 2.x was probably not explicitly stated as "let's sabotage this competing open standard by dragging our feet" but that was the result. AMD and Intel both put together OpenCL 2.x support, so clearly Nvidia could have finished their incomplete support but didn't. The fundamental failing Khronos made was repeating the GLSL mistake and not specifying a compiled IR that would decouple OpenCL kernel code from program execution. This was clearly known to be a mistake at the time, given ample evidence from CUDA and HLSL that an IR was possible and could greatly improve the developer experience.
- thayne 6y ago
  nVidia has a very long history of not getting along with Linux.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    And now, hilariously enough, they have ended up with a lot of their growth coming from Linux-based systems. To be fair, I recently bought a new Thinkpad, and with Ubuntu 20.04 and Nvidia CUDA just worked, with absolutely no tuning (I didn't even need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH, which I found pretty odd). So things seem to be improving, because there's money in it for Nvidia.
    - thayne 6y ago
      The Nouveau drivers have a throttled clock speed due to firmware signatures. And the proprietary drivers are complete mess on wayland, where most compositors and other GPU drivers use GBM, but Nvidia did their own thing and used EGLStreams. Maybe someday in the future the situation will improve, but historically, it hasn't been good.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  They have made it even more difficult for open-source to be able to reverse engineer their drivers with signed firmware blobs, push their own solution on Wayland, (ELStreams), over everyone else adopting GBM etc. - in short they refuse to cooperate in an official capacity. Both Intel and AMD do have an official FLOSS Linux driver and regularly work with the wider community.
chongli 6y ago
I think nVidia could run into some serious anti-trust issues if they tried to interfere with the ARM ecosystem. There's far too much at stake here. Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  I think there’s some MIPS and SH-3/SH-4 smartphones from the early 2000s still around. I had an SH-3 PDA in 2001, but Microsoft dropped support for SH-3 and MIPS in Windows CE by the time “Windows Smartphone 2002” came out (my 2002 HTC Canary runs ARM, IIRC) so it’d have to be a non-CE platform. What did the Palm Handspring use?
  - com2kid 6y ago
    Internally we supported SH4 through CE7! Source: I maintained the compiler test infra for it.
    - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      I salute you sir! What’s the current roadmap for CE? I saw there’s a new CE environment in Win10 IoT, but it feels like too-little-too-late to save the myriad of embedded enterprise CE systems.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        There is a recent post about it. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things/moving-forward-with-windows-ce-using-the-windows-ce-app/ba-p/1582360 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things/mo...
      - com2kid 6y ago
        > What’s the current roadmap for CE? No clue sorry! I left many many years ago. CE7 was incredibly good, the minimum image size we had it running on was ~20MB on disk.
xdavidliu 6y ago
> Apple won't be phased Nit: fazed, not phased.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  Unless we're in the Star Trek universe...
- scarface74 6y ago
  That doesn’t jive with how I’ve been spelling it....
  - robbiemitchell 6y ago
    It's jibe :)
    - scarface74 6y ago
      I know. That was the idea. It’s one of those mistakes that is like nails on a chalkboard for me.
      - robbiemitchell 6y ago
        You got me
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - xdavidliu 6y ago
        I was expecting you to make another one, but "nails on a chalkboard" seems to be the correct usage. Am just ever so slightly disappointed.
        OJFord 6y ago
        Meh, 'I could care less'. ...I can barely bring myself to type and submit that...
frandroid 6y ago
> Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves Their new notebooks are still moving to an ARM-based CPU... Even if they enhanced the ARM design they still have an ARM licence.
- protomyth 6y ago
  I would assume they had protected themselves before the SoftBank purchase. Also, it's odd that they refer to the new stuff as Apple Silicon.
  - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
    >Also, it's odd that they refer to the new stuff as Apple Silicon. Apple supposedly pays intel more for their CPUs than other OEM to avoid having their sticker on Macs; So I don't see this as odd, it's usual Apple branding tactic and from the looks of it(ARM being under threat of sale) it seems to be a wise decision as an average Apple customer wouldn't mind if it switches the architecture for its silicon.
    - rowanG077 6y ago
      I don't think Intel stickers are mandetory. Some other OEM don't have them either.
      - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
        Apple did make a big thing of it when they switched to Intel.
      - selectodude 6y ago
        Intel gives you a discount for putting stickers on there though.
    - ksec 6y ago
      >Apple supposedly pays intel more for their CPUs than other OEM to avoid having their sticker on Macs; It would be more accurate to say Apple does not receive the Marketing Discount from Intel. In reality i seriously doubt those discount dont materialise. Intel could have given the TB3 controller for free as part of the deal. Likely less than the Sticker Discount, but still a decent cost saving.
zaphirplane 6y ago
Wouldnt there be IP that Apple needs if they go their own way There was something about how qualcomm Bundles ip licensing with hardware purchases
- awalton 6y ago
  Apple just spent a billion dollars buying Intel's wireless modem business. If there's still a hardware reliance on Qualcomm, it's certainly coming to a quick end.
  - zaphirplane 6y ago
    I was commenting on the parent comment, that Apple doesn’t need ARM with an example of another company that push their products with their IP licenses
coreblocks 6y ago
Interestingly NVIDIA uses a RISC-V core in their GPUs.
simonh 6y ago
Apple’s ARM chips contain an awful lot of different components, some of which are highly customised. The neural engine stuff they use for image processing for example. The CPU cores are custom tuned, but I believe they are still 90% based on ARM CPU core designs. For example the Secure Enclave is actually an ARM developed CPU extension. Apple focuses their efforts vary specifically on areas that give them features that grant a competitive advantage. They don’t reimplement stuff for the sake of it. One of their big performance wins over other ARM licensees isn’t even really in the CPU, it’s the very well designed and generous cache memory systems. Having said that, looking to the future I think Apple is clearly willing to pour more resources into their CPU programme than any of their competitors. This means the risk to them is probably a lot less than to say Qualcomm or Samsung as they have a much better capability to go their own way. As time goes on their designs will probably diverge more and more from main line ARM anyway.
- unix_fan 6y ago
  Apple‘s designs are already far better than the equivalent ARM coRe. I doubt they're using anything besides the ISA.
- omikun 6y ago
  Apple licenses the isa only. They implement their own micro architecture.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Apple has an architecture license from ARM, which allows them to design their own cores yes, but also includes all the benefits of all the lower tiers including rights to all the ARM designs. This would have to be the case, because Apple still uses many of their earlier ARM designs in products, which we know used ARM designed cores and would definitely require core design licenses.
    - mycall 6y ago
      All this seems fitting since they are an ARM founder.
Reason077 6y ago
> "Apple ... could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice" Could they really do this? Start making incompatible designs? I would have thought that Apple's ARM architecture license would include terms to preclude incompatible forks.
- garblegarble 6y ago
  >I would have thought that Apple's ARM architecture license would include terms to preclude incompatible forks. For an ordinary licensee you might think so, but Apple may well have special terms, given that they co-founded ARM
  - znpy 6y ago
    > given that they co-founded ARM ?????
    - throw0101a 6y ago
      > The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology.[17][18][19] The new company intended to further the development of the Acorn RISC Machine processor, which was originally used in the Acorn Archimedes and had been selected by Apple for its Newton project. […] The company was first listed on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in 1998[23] and by February 1999, Apple's shareholding had fallen to 14.8%.[24] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings#Founding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings#Founding
      - craftinator 6y ago
        Holy moly, how did I never know this? I've worked on ARM based systems for years and never run across this tidbit. Thanks for sharing!
    - leejoramo 6y ago
      From the LA Times in 1990 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-28-fi-4993-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-28-fi-4993-s... Apple went on to use ARM in the Newton and other devices....
aj3 6y ago
Why don’t Apple buy ARM?
- stragies 6y ago
  They don't need too. They were a cofounder, and have a perpetual arch license
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    ah, this answers a lot of questions for me :)
- ris 6y ago
  This would be ten times worse (for everyone except Apple).

mud_dauber 6y ago

"nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others": can you elaborate or mention an example? That aspect has escaped me thus far.

foota 6y ago
CUDA is probably the biggest thing here, also I don't think they open source much.
- rl3 6y ago
  >... also I don't think they open source much. You could say that: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
- shaklee3 6y ago
  This is increasingly becoming not true. See cutlass and the new release of cufftdx.
  - ris 6y ago
    These are both things that are unlikely to ever be able to run on anything other than nvidia hardware. It's hardly a mark in their favour over abusive lock-in practices.
    - shaklee3 6y ago
      Well, of course. They're written in cuda. Why would Nvidia try to write it in a language like opencl that even AMD is moving away from, and instead making fft/blas library calls? At least the source code is there if you wanted to port it.
      - ris 6y ago
        I think it's very clear that I wasn't commenting on what framework they choose to write their projects in, and you're rather deliberately missing my point.
        shaklee3 6y ago
        > These are both things that are unlikely to ever be able to run on anything other than nvidia hardware. I think it's very clear that the framework was important here. Because you were pointing out that they don't open source much, I pointed out that they do, then you nitpicked by saying it's cuda.
- tasty_freeze 6y ago
  I had no idea, so I just searched and found there are 201 repositories in their github: https://github.com/NVIDIA https://github.com/NVIDIA
  - asddubs 6y ago
    that's a pretty meaningless number without further context
    - tasty_freeze 6y ago
      The person I replied to said nvidia doesn't contribute much to open source. I pointed at their github repositories. If you care about the context, it is there, and there is no risk of me summarizing it unfairly.
      - andoriyu 6y ago
        Having some of your code in github isn't contributing to open source.
numakerg 6y ago
I recall the GeForce Partner Program raised some controversy, although I couldn't say whether or it was bad or good or why. There's also the issue with them refusing to open source Linux drivers. Supposedly this is because they throttle workstation GPUs to create a market for higher-end versions while reducing the manufacturing diversity, but I haven't heard a definitive source for this.
- bonzini 6y ago
  > they throttle workstation GPUs Not sure about this, but they definitely prevent the loading of drivers for GeForce cards if they detect a hypervisor (Quadro cards work). Nvidia claims that it's a bug, and that they're not fixing it only because GeForce cards are not sold to be run in virtual machines. At the very least it's a dubious claim since for a short time there was an arms race as workarounds were figured out and the next version of the driver would detect them... Of course it's market segmentation by obscurity so it only lasted a few weeks and it's trivial to work around, but still it's quite shady since there's absolutely no ill effect from the work around.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    It is absolutely not a bug, Disassembly of NVIDIA drivers shows that its looking for specific KVM signatures, and if you modify those signatures, magically it starts working again...
    - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
      Removing KVM signature is now the standard solution. But there's still a working driver patch to remove the virtualization check, it's available at here. * sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher: Fixes "Bug" in Nvidia Driver preventing "Unsupported Configurations" from being used on KVM https://github.com/sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher https://github.com/sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher
    - bonzini 6y ago
      Of course it's not a bug. :-)
AmericanChopper 6y ago
This sentiment comes entirely from their lack of open source drivers for Linux. It became pretty much a meme after a rant that Linus had about them in 2012.
9935c101ab17a66 6y ago
There was the apple gpu fiasco. Apple laptop GPUs were failing at an extraordinary rate in 2010-2011, and Apple were getting harangued in the media about it (which was justified). Apple eventually announced a program to cover replacement of the GPUs, but it was very delayed. I'm 100% convinced the delay was caused by Nvidia refusing to accept responsibility. When the program was released, in order to have the repair completed at no cost, your computer had to fail a very specific graphics diagnostic, and the failure would be linked to your serial number in Apple's repair CRM. At the time, no other apple repair program had this requirement — Don't get me wrong, it makes sense to use diagnostics to verify hardware issues, but they aren't the only tool you can use. I'm convinced Nvidia only would reimburse apple for computers that had a recorded failure of this specific test. Since 2014, apple has almost exclusively used AMD graphics cards in computers that do have discrete GPUs, and I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest this was motivated with their terrible experience with Nvidia. (I'm aware I'm not really backing this up with evidence, but I think the publicly available facts about the whole situation support this narrative)
- karlshea 6y ago
  That situation was also following Nvidia spoiling one of Steve Jobs' announcements even further back, so there was already a bit of bad blood.
  - 9935c101ab17a66 6y ago
    Good point, I had forgotten about that.
    - andoriyu 6y ago
      Which one was that?
- scarface74 6y ago
  Don't get me wrong, it makes sense to use diagnostics to verify hardware issues, but they aren't the only tool you can use. I'm convinced Nvidia only would reimburse apple for computers that had a recorded failure of this specific test. In 2010, Apple wasn’t exactly a beleaguered company. It wasn’t like NVidia not reimbursing Apple would break the bank. Apple should have repaired it just to protect its reputation. Jobs himself was famous for saying to high level employees that at a certain level of authority, you don’t get to make excuses.
awalton 6y ago
Google it maybe? Here's one example thread to pull at: why did Apple stop buying nVidia GPUs across their entire hardware line? EGLStreams is a recent pain in the ass. nVidia's infanticide of OpenCL with CUDA being another painful reminder that nVidia doesn't care about your software needs, just their own. It's really not hard to find a company that nVidia's pissed off with its dealings.
- rrss 6y ago
  If there was an infanticide of OpenCL, Apple (the original creator of OpenCL) was at least as responsible as Nvidia.
johnklos 6y ago
NVIDIA can compete based on the superior performance of their products, but that's not enough. They try to attempt lock-in by encouraging software writers to use CUDA and not use OpenCL. In many projects that support both, OpenCL and CUDA often give similar performance, and in some, OpenCL is faster than CUDA. So CUDA isn't about getting more performance - it's about excluding everything non-NVIDIA. I suspect that NVIDIA's gameplaying is what led to Apple deciding to not use NVIDIA in any Macs for the last several years.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  They don't need to do any lock-in when the choice is between plain old C with printf like debugging, and a set of programming languages able to target PTX, with out of the box support for C, C++, Fortran and several managed languages, and nice graphical debugging tools. C++ support only came to OpenCL after it was clear to Khronos that it was time to move beyond C only vision of the world, yet almost no one bothered to implement OpenCL 2.x, which is why OpenCL 3.0 is basically OpenCL 1.2 to make all those OEM compliant, and SYCL is now moving into an backend agnostic C++ stack. So the competition did not move a finger to make OpenCL eco-system beat CUDA tooling, Google did not cared one second to make OpenCL available on Android instead pushed for their own Renderscript C99 dialect, but it is easy to blame NVidia when competition isn't up to their stuff. Just like Apple, after creating OpenCL and offering it to Khronos, moved away from their own creation after disputes on how OpenCL roadmap should be managed. Ironically, just like with CUDA, Metal Compute happens to be multiple language aware and having a modern API.
  - cpgxiii 6y ago
    The problem with OpenCL, just like OpenGL, is that it relies on vendor support for essentially the full stack. That means if a single vendor doesn't support the feature, it's basically impossible to ship any code that uses that feature to arbitrary users. Nvidia lagging behind in its support for OpenCL 2.x was probably not explicitly stated as "let's sabotage this competing open standard by dragging our feet" but that was the result. AMD and Intel both put together OpenCL 2.x support, so clearly Nvidia could have finished their incomplete support but didn't. The fundamental failing Khronos made was repeating the GLSL mistake and not specifying a compiled IR that would decouple OpenCL kernel code from program execution. This was clearly known to be a mistake at the time, given ample evidence from CUDA and HLSL that an IR was possible and could greatly improve the developer experience.
thayne 6y ago
nVidia has a very long history of not getting along with Linux.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  And now, hilariously enough, they have ended up with a lot of their growth coming from Linux-based systems. To be fair, I recently bought a new Thinkpad, and with Ubuntu 20.04 and Nvidia CUDA just worked, with absolutely no tuning (I didn't even need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH, which I found pretty odd). So things seem to be improving, because there's money in it for Nvidia.
  - thayne 6y ago
    The Nouveau drivers have a throttled clock speed due to firmware signatures. And the proprietary drivers are complete mess on wayland, where most compositors and other GPU drivers use GBM, but Nvidia did their own thing and used EGLStreams. Maybe someday in the future the situation will improve, but historically, it hasn't been good.
AsyncAwait 6y ago
They have made it even more difficult for open-source to be able to reverse engineer their drivers with signed firmware blobs, push their own solution on Wayland, (ELStreams), over everyone else adopting GBM etc. - in short they refuse to cooperate in an official capacity. Both Intel and AMD do have an official FLOSS Linux driver and regularly work with the wider community.

chongli 6y ago

I think nVidia could run into some serious anti-trust issues if they tried to interfere with the ARM ecosystem. There's far too much at stake here. Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
I think there’s some MIPS and SH-3/SH-4 smartphones from the early 2000s still around. I had an SH-3 PDA in 2001, but Microsoft dropped support for SH-3 and MIPS in Windows CE by the time “Windows Smartphone 2002” came out (my 2002 HTC Canary runs ARM, IIRC) so it’d have to be a non-CE platform. What did the Palm Handspring use?
- com2kid 6y ago
  Internally we supported SH4 through CE7! Source: I maintained the compiler test infra for it.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    I salute you sir! What’s the current roadmap for CE? I saw there’s a new CE environment in Win10 IoT, but it feels like too-little-too-late to save the myriad of embedded enterprise CE systems.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      There is a recent post about it. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things/moving-forward-with-windows-ce-using-the-windows-ce-app/ba-p/1582360 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things/mo...
    - com2kid 6y ago
      > What’s the current roadmap for CE? No clue sorry! I left many many years ago. CE7 was incredibly good, the minimum image size we had it running on was ~20MB on disk.

xdavidliu 6y ago

> Apple won't be phased Nit: fazed, not phased.

geerlingguy 6y ago
Unless we're in the Star Trek universe...
scarface74 6y ago
That doesn’t jive with how I’ve been spelling it....
- robbiemitchell 6y ago
  It's jibe :)
  - scarface74 6y ago
    I know. That was the idea. It’s one of those mistakes that is like nails on a chalkboard for me.
    - robbiemitchell 6y ago
      You got me
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - xdavidliu 6y ago
      I was expecting you to make another one, but "nails on a chalkboard" seems to be the correct usage. Am just ever so slightly disappointed.
      - OJFord 6y ago
        Meh, 'I could care less'. ...I can barely bring myself to type and submit that...

frandroid 6y ago

> Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves Their new notebooks are still moving to an ARM-based CPU... Even if they enhanced the ARM design they still have an ARM licence.

protomyth 6y ago
I would assume they had protected themselves before the SoftBank purchase. Also, it's odd that they refer to the new stuff as Apple Silicon.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  >Also, it's odd that they refer to the new stuff as Apple Silicon. Apple supposedly pays intel more for their CPUs than other OEM to avoid having their sticker on Macs; So I don't see this as odd, it's usual Apple branding tactic and from the looks of it(ARM being under threat of sale) it seems to be a wise decision as an average Apple customer wouldn't mind if it switches the architecture for its silicon.
  - rowanG077 6y ago
    I don't think Intel stickers are mandetory. Some other OEM don't have them either.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      Apple did make a big thing of it when they switched to Intel.
    - selectodude 6y ago
      Intel gives you a discount for putting stickers on there though.
  - ksec 6y ago
    >Apple supposedly pays intel more for their CPUs than other OEM to avoid having their sticker on Macs; It would be more accurate to say Apple does not receive the Marketing Discount from Intel. In reality i seriously doubt those discount dont materialise. Intel could have given the TB3 controller for free as part of the deal. Likely less than the Sticker Discount, but still a decent cost saving.

zaphirplane 6y ago

Wouldnt there be IP that Apple needs if they go their own way There was something about how qualcomm Bundles ip licensing with hardware purchases

awalton 6y ago
Apple just spent a billion dollars buying Intel's wireless modem business. If there's still a hardware reliance on Qualcomm, it's certainly coming to a quick end.
- zaphirplane 6y ago
  I was commenting on the parent comment, that Apple doesn’t need ARM with an example of another company that push their products with their IP licenses

coreblocks 6y ago

Interestingly NVIDIA uses a RISC-V core in their GPUs.

simonh 6y ago

Apple’s ARM chips contain an awful lot of different components, some of which are highly customised. The neural engine stuff they use for image processing for example. The CPU cores are custom tuned, but I believe they are still 90% based on ARM CPU core designs. For example the Secure Enclave is actually an ARM developed CPU extension. Apple focuses their efforts vary specifically on areas that give them features that grant a competitive advantage. They don’t reimplement stuff for the sake of it. One of their big performance wins over other ARM licensees isn’t even really in the CPU, it’s the very well designed and generous cache memory systems. Having said that, looking to the future I think Apple is clearly willing to pour more resources into their CPU programme than any of their competitors. This means the risk to them is probably a lot less than to say Qualcomm or Samsung as they have a much better capability to go their own way. As time goes on their designs will probably diverge more and more from main line ARM anyway.

unix_fan 6y ago
Apple‘s designs are already far better than the equivalent ARM coRe. I doubt they're using anything besides the ISA.
omikun 6y ago
Apple licenses the isa only. They implement their own micro architecture.
- simonh 6y ago
  Apple has an architecture license from ARM, which allows them to design their own cores yes, but also includes all the benefits of all the lower tiers including rights to all the ARM designs. This would have to be the case, because Apple still uses many of their earlier ARM designs in products, which we know used ARM designed cores and would definitely require core design licenses.
  - mycall 6y ago
    All this seems fitting since they are an ARM founder.

Reason077 6y ago

> "Apple ... could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice" Could they really do this? Start making incompatible designs? I would have thought that Apple's ARM architecture license would include terms to preclude incompatible forks.

garblegarble 6y ago
>I would have thought that Apple's ARM architecture license would include terms to preclude incompatible forks. For an ordinary licensee you might think so, but Apple may well have special terms, given that they co-founded ARM
- znpy 6y ago
  > given that they co-founded ARM ?????
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    > The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology.[17][18][19] The new company intended to further the development of the Acorn RISC Machine processor, which was originally used in the Acorn Archimedes and had been selected by Apple for its Newton project. […] The company was first listed on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in 1998[23] and by February 1999, Apple's shareholding had fallen to 14.8%.[24] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings#Founding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings#Founding
    - craftinator 6y ago
      Holy moly, how did I never know this? I've worked on ARM based systems for years and never run across this tidbit. Thanks for sharing!
  - leejoramo 6y ago
    From the LA Times in 1990 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-28-fi-4993-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-28-fi-4993-s... Apple went on to use ARM in the Newton and other devices....

aj3 6y ago

Why don’t Apple buy ARM?

stragies 6y ago
They don't need too. They were a cofounder, and have a perpetual arch license
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  ah, this answers a lot of questions for me :)
ris 6y ago
This would be ten times worse (for everyone except Apple).