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Is this perhaps a foretelling of what is to come? If Arm plan to drop Mali completely, to be replaced by something from Nvidia, this could be an early step to

Is this perhaps a foretelling of what is to come? If Arm plan to drop Mali completely, to be replaced by something from Nvidia, this could be an early step to washing their hands of driver itself. Edit: That was a bit cynical. More charitably, open sourcing the driver under these circumstances would allow the community to continue to use and support Mali even if Arm were looking to discontinue it.

Ericson2314 6y ago
Even if NVidia is going to abandon Mali, why give consumers less reason to switch and not jump ship to some hypothetical RISC-V thing? (Before one might say "well, it was already closed source".) I want to believe this is some mid-level employee going rouge trying to salvage what they can before the inevitable rent seeking :D.
- core-questions 6y ago
  I don't get why everyone is so negative about Nvidia Arm. Is it not possible that this leads to good competition in the datacenter, and pushing prices down generally?
  - LockAndLol 6y ago
    In English saying "no competition" means either there are no competitors or the existing rivals lack the skills or resources to compete. On the other hand, having a lot of competition means the opposite: a lot of rivals that have the skills and resources to compete --> 0...n. Merging is n-1 thus reducing competition. Can you explain how merging two companies and thus removing a competitor leads to good competition?
    - core-questions 6y ago
      ARM is not really yet a competitor because I can't just go to HP or Dell and get an ARM machine. I'd have to go out of my way, buy something from a smaller vendor, etc. If Nvidia ARM machines become something that first-tier server vendors make available, there will indeed be competition in places there there isn't presently.
      - wtallis 6y ago
        It seems like you're trying to finesse definitions until the answers come out the way you want. Why would ARM count as a competitor if there are ARM servers for sale from HP or Dell, but it doesn't count when there are ARM servers for sale from Gigabyte, and for rent on Amazon EC2? And in another comment, you're doing the same thing about what it means to have 3D graphics support.
      - gnufx 6y ago
        why can't you buy one of these, for instance (not that GPUs are relevant to it)? https://buy.hpe.com/uk/en/servers/apollo-systems/apollo-80-system/apollo-80-system/hpe-apollo-80-system/p/1012970957 https://buy.hpe.com/uk/en/servers/apollo-systems/apollo-80-s...
  - kmeisthax 6y ago
    Nobody likes working with Nvidia, and nobody trusts Nvidia to continue licensing ARM designs and patents under the same generous licensing terms that ARM was. There's several different ARM licensees that make their own designs or repackage ARM designs in custom SoCs. Nvidia would materially benefit from, say, refusing to license designs and patents to competing silicon vendors. It would take Tegra from "that thing the Switch uses" to the only option available for smartphone vendors. You know how everyone hates Qualcomm because they more or less pushed every other SoC vendor out of the market with aggressive patent licensing terms? Imagine that but worse.
    - ksec 6y ago
      Doing that doesn't hurt majority of the current licensees, only smaller ones. Making Tegra competing with say Mediatek doesn't gain Nvidia much. Stop Licensing ARM would put $40 Billion down the drain. ( Arguably it is only $12 Billion cash with stocks ) I also dont see Nintendo have problem working with Nvidia. That doesn't mean Nvidia is good or bad. I just dont see how Nvidia's interest, ARM Interest, and most people ( including on HN ) 's interest align.
    - izacus 6y ago
      Can you please elaborate on who your "nobody" actually is? Because the amount of partnerships nVidia has kinda makes your point suspect.
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    > Is it not possible that this leads to good competition in the datacenter, and pushing prices down generally? Possible? Yes. Likely? I doubt it. Just look at nvidia's past behavior with Linux.
    - core-questions 6y ago
      There's an alternate take on this where Nvidia is the only reason why there's any 3D support on Linux worth a damn....
      - izacus 6y ago
        I love how this community downvotes everyone who remembers the actual state of 3D on Linux in 2010s and goes against the smearing campaign.
        bayindirh 6y ago
        > I love how this community downvotes everyone who remembers the actual state of 3D on Linux in 2010s and goes against the smearing campaign. I have been there, on both teams. I've helped nudging one of them to their current position. nVidia was not like this in 2010s. Their drivers were spotless, performant and specs conformant. Things went very downhill with the rise of CUDA. Since CUDA became a compute monopoly, nVidia didn't feel the need to play by the books. The undercut OpenCL agressively. Drivers' code quality went downhill. Tesla got the priority and desktop support went downhill. I have a friend who's developing a game engine. He praised nVidia's debugging tools and utilities and swears to their drivers on any platform. Flags got ignored, code does what it wants, not what it's told to do. Commands replaced in terms of automatic optimization... It's just a black box which does something convoluted to make things work. I'm not talking about game/app/binary specific optimizations. I'm talking about standards compliant, run of the mill code. There's nothing left of the nVidia of 2010s. They became greedy, blind, uncaring and devastating. They were the days, when the green team was the savior of 3D on the Linux Boxen. Time has moved, that ship has sailed. Red team redesigned their silicon just for open drivers. Intel started publishing well functioning open source drivers. nVidia became the dominant player in the Compute & AI segment, and they left the GPU/Desktop/OpenGL field behind.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    M & A leading to competition? ha ha very funny.
pantalaimon 6y ago
I think this was already planned well before the Nvidia acquisition

Ericson2314 6y ago

Even if NVidia is going to abandon Mali, why give consumers less reason to switch and not jump ship to some hypothetical RISC-V thing? (Before one might say "well, it was already closed source".) I want to believe this is some mid-level employee going rouge trying to salvage what they can before the inevitable rent seeking :D.

core-questions 6y ago
I don't get why everyone is so negative about Nvidia Arm. Is it not possible that this leads to good competition in the datacenter, and pushing prices down generally?
- LockAndLol 6y ago
  In English saying "no competition" means either there are no competitors or the existing rivals lack the skills or resources to compete. On the other hand, having a lot of competition means the opposite: a lot of rivals that have the skills and resources to compete --> 0...n. Merging is n-1 thus reducing competition. Can you explain how merging two companies and thus removing a competitor leads to good competition?
  - core-questions 6y ago
    ARM is not really yet a competitor because I can't just go to HP or Dell and get an ARM machine. I'd have to go out of my way, buy something from a smaller vendor, etc. If Nvidia ARM machines become something that first-tier server vendors make available, there will indeed be competition in places there there isn't presently.
    - wtallis 6y ago
      It seems like you're trying to finesse definitions until the answers come out the way you want. Why would ARM count as a competitor if there are ARM servers for sale from HP or Dell, but it doesn't count when there are ARM servers for sale from Gigabyte, and for rent on Amazon EC2? And in another comment, you're doing the same thing about what it means to have 3D graphics support.
    - gnufx 6y ago
      why can't you buy one of these, for instance (not that GPUs are relevant to it)? https://buy.hpe.com/uk/en/servers/apollo-systems/apollo-80-system/apollo-80-system/hpe-apollo-80-system/p/1012970957 https://buy.hpe.com/uk/en/servers/apollo-systems/apollo-80-s...
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  Nobody likes working with Nvidia, and nobody trusts Nvidia to continue licensing ARM designs and patents under the same generous licensing terms that ARM was. There's several different ARM licensees that make their own designs or repackage ARM designs in custom SoCs. Nvidia would materially benefit from, say, refusing to license designs and patents to competing silicon vendors. It would take Tegra from "that thing the Switch uses" to the only option available for smartphone vendors. You know how everyone hates Qualcomm because they more or less pushed every other SoC vendor out of the market with aggressive patent licensing terms? Imagine that but worse.
  - ksec 6y ago
    Doing that doesn't hurt majority of the current licensees, only smaller ones. Making Tegra competing with say Mediatek doesn't gain Nvidia much. Stop Licensing ARM would put $40 Billion down the drain. ( Arguably it is only $12 Billion cash with stocks ) I also dont see Nintendo have problem working with Nvidia. That doesn't mean Nvidia is good or bad. I just dont see how Nvidia's interest, ARM Interest, and most people ( including on HN ) 's interest align.
  - izacus 6y ago
    Can you please elaborate on who your "nobody" actually is? Because the amount of partnerships nVidia has kinda makes your point suspect.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  > Is it not possible that this leads to good competition in the datacenter, and pushing prices down generally? Possible? Yes. Likely? I doubt it. Just look at nvidia's past behavior with Linux.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    There's an alternate take on this where Nvidia is the only reason why there's any 3D support on Linux worth a damn....
    - izacus 6y ago
      I love how this community downvotes everyone who remembers the actual state of 3D on Linux in 2010s and goes against the smearing campaign.
      - bayindirh 6y ago
        > I love how this community downvotes everyone who remembers the actual state of 3D on Linux in 2010s and goes against the smearing campaign. I have been there, on both teams. I've helped nudging one of them to their current position. nVidia was not like this in 2010s. Their drivers were spotless, performant and specs conformant. Things went very downhill with the rise of CUDA. Since CUDA became a compute monopoly, nVidia didn't feel the need to play by the books. The undercut OpenCL agressively. Drivers' code quality went downhill. Tesla got the priority and desktop support went downhill. I have a friend who's developing a game engine. He praised nVidia's debugging tools and utilities and swears to their drivers on any platform. Flags got ignored, code does what it wants, not what it's told to do. Commands replaced in terms of automatic optimization... It's just a black box which does something convoluted to make things work. I'm not talking about game/app/binary specific optimizations. I'm talking about standards compliant, run of the mill code. There's nothing left of the nVidia of 2010s. They became greedy, blind, uncaring and devastating. They were the days, when the green team was the savior of 3D on the Linux Boxen. Time has moved, that ship has sailed. Red team redesigned their silicon just for open drivers. Intel started publishing well functioning open source drivers. nVidia became the dominant player in the Compute & AI segment, and they left the GPU/Desktop/OpenGL field behind.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  M & A leading to competition? ha ha very funny.

pantalaimon 6y ago

I think this was already planned well before the Nvidia acquisition