5 ms·

Good, we need more players, not less.

by sekh60 5y ago

lunfard000 5y ago
I didn't like much this but having ARM in the hands of financial institution which doesn't have any motivation to invest in the technology doesn't seem any better (and probably doesnt understand/doesnt care about it). In the other hand, Nvidia have a good track record creating good products.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- p1necone 5y ago
  NVidia has a track record of creating good products, but all proprietary and with closed source firmware/drivers. And lots of arbitrarily software locking features to extract more money from different market segments.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    > And lots of arbitrarily software locking features to extract more money from different market segments. This is the cultural difference between ARM and Nvidia. ARM does care enough about their IP that you'll need to pay them for ARM's effort to develop their IP, but beyond that they will not restrict you unless it'll put ARM into legal trouble (basically export restrictions). Hey, you could get everything now with a one-time license payment if you are willing to do that. It's not FSF open, but it's certainly better than a lot of hardware companies. Nvidia is trying to extract everything into each pipeline. You want to use their hardware? You have to agree to only use this to precise conditions that is purely for market segmentation, which conflicts with ARM's culture. Compounding this with the fact that almost all acquisitions done by Nvidia that was more open was closed down (try talking to Nvidia about Mellanox), if the ARM acquisition proceeded, it'll be a bad day for everyone else.
    - p1necone 5y ago
      Imo the poor state of the GPU market competition-wise is the only way NVidia is able to get away with this, otherwise competitors would just eat their lunch by doing exactly the same thing without the arbitrary market segmentation.
      - lmm 5y ago
        NVidia are legitimately good at what they do, it's not like Oracle where all the money comes from milking the licensing arrangements.
        zinekeller 5y ago
        I'd definitely agree on that though, Nvidia is really good on what they're doing, just disappointed that they don't view the open-source community as a positive. F*** Oracle definitely, they can't even bother to have a proper SystemD service on systems which uses SystemD, relying on scripts that are definitely not redeeming them.
    - lunfard00 5y ago
      That is good for Samsung/Qualcomm/Mediatek/Apple, but let's be honest, it is a failure as a business. Despite of being used on pretty much 100% of all smartphones' SoC, they barely make any money. Also, their designs are lagging behind, M1 and probably Nuvia are example of that.
      - dijit 5y ago
        I think their designs are meant to be lagging, M1 isn't "just better" it's a lot more about media encoding and packing more types of cores together, which while innovative is not what ARM should be doing. ARM makes prototype designs that you can extend, M1 is an absolute success of that model. Regardless: you say they've failed as a business, your metric is how much they earn from being nearly everywhere. I would pointedly disagree: they're everywhere, that's success, they're everywhere and profitable. There's absolutely no need to rent seek... this is unsustainable capitalist thinking. They're able to innovate and turn a profit with their "modest" income, why do you need them to do more than that? How do you know they would do better with more money? Intel (yes, apple to oranges) has many orders of magnitude more money, but most of it goes into bureaucracies. See also: Microsoft, Oracle
  - dnautics 5y ago
    > And lots of arbitrarily software locking features to extract more money from different market segments. To be fair, AMD does super annoying lock in/binning things too, though not with software locking. For example, there was a Radeon that would have been a crazy awesome server rack mounted GPU for Deep learning 4U blades. You couldn't put it in a server because it was mounted on a chassis that was 4mm too large for PCI spec. (Btw I hate hate hate Nvidia so this is not pointless whataboutism)
    - paulmd 5y ago
      AMD is also moving towards proprietary interconnects for their add-on cards that provide higher performance links than their competitors are allowed to use. And they won't license them to their competitors of course - it's a "set bonus" if you buy all AMD. It's funny because people were panicking about Intel doing exactly that, and when AMD does it, crickets. They also have moved to locking their CPUs to the motherboards, to restrict second-hand sales of surplus CPUs/etc. So far it's only locked to the brand, so you can put it in any Dell system but only a dell system, but it's still sufficient to cause a huge amount of headaches for the surplus sector. I was looking at some cheap Epyc 7402Ps on ebay until I saw... "locked to dell, only runs on Dell". Welp. And the other cheap listing, is that one locked too? Who knows, and that's the point AMD is going for, they just have to inject enough uncertainty to change consumer behavior. Most people aren't going to be willing to trace the provenance of a used CPU, they will just pay 20% more for a new one. A limited number will be sold as complete systems, but as the market shrinks and people stop considering secondhand purchases, eventually they will just be thrown in the trash. Mission accomplished. And that's coming for consumer CPUs too. It's already here for AMD's "ryzen pro" desktop line, it won't be long until it hits walmart prebuilts too.
      - dralley 5y ago
        > Who knows, and that's the point AMD is going for, they just have to inject enough uncertainty to change consumer behavior. That's not "the point". The purpose of the feature is legitimate, but you're right that the consequences suck hard for the second hand market. The thing you're talking about is a security feature where the CPU would be locked to only boot when the firmware is signed by a particular signing key. If you're a high-value target such as a cloud vendor or a government / military, attacks on the firmware are a legitimate threat, and this ensures that the firmware cannot be silently tampered with. This is a big deal to them and that's the reason why AMD implemented this. But yes, most people don't need or want this. It's entirely optional, it's supposed to be something the customer configures, but Lenovo turned it on by default. Pressure needs to be put on Lenovo to stop doing so.
- teruakohatu 5y ago
  > Nvidia have a good track record creating good products. What incentive would Nvidia have to develop new ARM features that would assist competitors in competing with them? The Fujitsu's A64FX Processor for example somewhat competes with Nvidia datacenter GPUs. What incentive would Nvidia have to continue to develop the Arm Scalable Vector Extension? The only good thing from this sale would be the pivot to RISC-V.
  - lunfard000 5y ago
    Money? like Samsung selling their chips to Apple. Nvidia have a lot of proprietary stuff which allows them to get away even with inferior hardware. Nvidia will prob lose the AI datacenter market anyways, customs asics will just use RISC-V if Nvidia try to stop them.
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      Nvidia doesn't care about secondary money. They're all about integrating stuff and denying others to do so. Nvidia is a castle because of the moats they've built. Not because they're leaps and bounds ahead in terms of silicon and technical wizardry. They shunned OpenCL, they'll probably shun Vulkan for GPGPU and make sure that people are locked to CUDA and its ecosystem. They have no intention to play fair. We're going to see how Mellanox will evolve under their command.
      - lunfard000 5y ago
        wasn't OpenCL a mess even on AMD cards and isnt it almost deprecated?* And Nvidia's OpenGL drivers on windows are way better than AMD's. I dont like Nvidia especially after all the error 43 bullshit, but they are competent. Now ARM is going public, wont that make things even worse? [0]:https://www.reddit.com/r/realAMD/comments/qujwas/amd_drops_opencl_for_rocm_hip_cuda_equivalent_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/realAMD/comments/qujwas/amd_drops_o...
      - paulmd 5y ago
        > They shunned OpenCL, they'll probably shun Vulkan for GPGPU this comment is factually untrue and anyone can check it for themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#Conformant_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#Conformant_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan#Intel,_Nvidia_and_AMD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan#Intel,_Nvidia_and_AMD it would be absolutely insane not to support either of those features. An absolute shit-ton of games use Vulkan these days, there is zero chance of that being deprecated in any timespan not measured in decades. Everyone is still supporting OpenGL after all, and that's like what, an early 90s API? there is a larger point to be made here about some of the reflexively negative responses people have when the N-word is brought up. There are certainly criticisms you can make of NVIDIA, but people have this intense and reflexively negative emotional response that tends to slide these discussions into flamewar territory. I know I'm about to hear about how Linus gave them the finger (cause he's a totally balanced and wholesome person), but providing a closed-source linux driver and not supporting wayland (which I think they did eventually anyway?) aren't the end of the world like people make them out to be. Pick the product that fits your needs, if not move on, you don't need to become emotionally attached and you can keep your positions fact-based.
- shmerl 5y ago
  Nvidia also has a long track record of anti-competitive behavior. So it's a good thing they didn't get ARM.
  - snvzz 5y ago
    >So it's a good thing they didn't get ARM. It doesn't matter, as the damage is done. Once the industry caught a whiff of NVIDIA's intent to purchase ARM, they looked for alternatives. That's RISC-V. Today, it's been years and the RISC-V efforts within the industry have advanced considerably. These won't be dropped now, irrespective of ARM's fate.
  - chasil 5y ago
    There is nothing to prevent NVidia from buying stock. A lot of stock.
    - shmerl 5y ago
      Shouldn't be nothing, otherwise anti-trust has some major hole.
- karmasimida 5y ago
  Well money speaks, who would own them? The ones actually are willing to pay the price. It is not other people's say unfortunately.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > Nvidia have a good track record creating good products. And a bad track record of preventing interoperability and cross-vendor standardization, to lock customers in.
odiroot 5y ago
*fewer. Sorry had to do it.

Good, we need more players, not less.

by sekh60 5y ago

Good, we need more players, not less.

I didn't like much this but having ARM in the hands of financial institution which doesn't have any motivation to invest in the technology doesn't seem any better (and probably doesnt understand/doesnt care about it). In the other hand, Nvidia have a good track record creating good products.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
p1necone 5y ago
NVidia has a track record of creating good products, but all proprietary and with closed source firmware/drivers. And lots of arbitrarily software locking features to extract more money from different market segments.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  > And lots of arbitrarily software locking features to extract more money from different market segments. This is the cultural difference between ARM and Nvidia. ARM does care enough about their IP that you'll need to pay them for ARM's effort to develop their IP, but beyond that they will not restrict you unless it'll put ARM into legal trouble (basically export restrictions). Hey, you could get everything now with a one-time license payment if you are willing to do that. It's not FSF open, but it's certainly better than a lot of hardware companies. Nvidia is trying to extract everything into each pipeline. You want to use their hardware? You have to agree to only use this to precise conditions that is purely for market segmentation, which conflicts with ARM's culture. Compounding this with the fact that almost all acquisitions done by Nvidia that was more open was closed down (try talking to Nvidia about Mellanox), if the ARM acquisition proceeded, it'll be a bad day for everyone else.
  - p1necone 5y ago
    Imo the poor state of the GPU market competition-wise is the only way NVidia is able to get away with this, otherwise competitors would just eat their lunch by doing exactly the same thing without the arbitrary market segmentation.
    - lmm 5y ago
      NVidia are legitimately good at what they do, it's not like Oracle where all the money comes from milking the licensing arrangements.
      - zinekeller 5y ago
        I'd definitely agree on that though, Nvidia is really good on what they're doing, just disappointed that they don't view the open-source community as a positive. F*** Oracle definitely, they can't even bother to have a proper SystemD service on systems which uses SystemD, relying on scripts that are definitely not redeeming them.
  - lunfard00 5y ago
    That is good for Samsung/Qualcomm/Mediatek/Apple, but let's be honest, it is a failure as a business. Despite of being used on pretty much 100% of all smartphones' SoC, they barely make any money. Also, their designs are lagging behind, M1 and probably Nuvia are example of that.
    - dijit 5y ago
      I think their designs are meant to be lagging, M1 isn't "just better" it's a lot more about media encoding and packing more types of cores together, which while innovative is not what ARM should be doing. ARM makes prototype designs that you can extend, M1 is an absolute success of that model. Regardless: you say they've failed as a business, your metric is how much they earn from being nearly everywhere. I would pointedly disagree: they're everywhere, that's success, they're everywhere and profitable. There's absolutely no need to rent seek... this is unsustainable capitalist thinking. They're able to innovate and turn a profit with their "modest" income, why do you need them to do more than that? How do you know they would do better with more money? Intel (yes, apple to oranges) has many orders of magnitude more money, but most of it goes into bureaucracies. See also: Microsoft, Oracle
- dnautics 5y ago
  > And lots of arbitrarily software locking features to extract more money from different market segments. To be fair, AMD does super annoying lock in/binning things too, though not with software locking. For example, there was a Radeon that would have been a crazy awesome server rack mounted GPU for Deep learning 4U blades. You couldn't put it in a server because it was mounted on a chassis that was 4mm too large for PCI spec. (Btw I hate hate hate Nvidia so this is not pointless whataboutism)
  - paulmd 5y ago
    AMD is also moving towards proprietary interconnects for their add-on cards that provide higher performance links than their competitors are allowed to use. And they won't license them to their competitors of course - it's a "set bonus" if you buy all AMD. It's funny because people were panicking about Intel doing exactly that, and when AMD does it, crickets. They also have moved to locking their CPUs to the motherboards, to restrict second-hand sales of surplus CPUs/etc. So far it's only locked to the brand, so you can put it in any Dell system but only a dell system, but it's still sufficient to cause a huge amount of headaches for the surplus sector. I was looking at some cheap Epyc 7402Ps on ebay until I saw... "locked to dell, only runs on Dell". Welp. And the other cheap listing, is that one locked too? Who knows, and that's the point AMD is going for, they just have to inject enough uncertainty to change consumer behavior. Most people aren't going to be willing to trace the provenance of a used CPU, they will just pay 20% more for a new one. A limited number will be sold as complete systems, but as the market shrinks and people stop considering secondhand purchases, eventually they will just be thrown in the trash. Mission accomplished. And that's coming for consumer CPUs too. It's already here for AMD's "ryzen pro" desktop line, it won't be long until it hits walmart prebuilts too.
    - dralley 5y ago
      > Who knows, and that's the point AMD is going for, they just have to inject enough uncertainty to change consumer behavior. That's not "the point". The purpose of the feature is legitimate, but you're right that the consequences suck hard for the second hand market. The thing you're talking about is a security feature where the CPU would be locked to only boot when the firmware is signed by a particular signing key. If you're a high-value target such as a cloud vendor or a government / military, attacks on the firmware are a legitimate threat, and this ensures that the firmware cannot be silently tampered with. This is a big deal to them and that's the reason why AMD implemented this. But yes, most people don't need or want this. It's entirely optional, it's supposed to be something the customer configures, but Lenovo turned it on by default. Pressure needs to be put on Lenovo to stop doing so.
teruakohatu 5y ago
> Nvidia have a good track record creating good products. What incentive would Nvidia have to develop new ARM features that would assist competitors in competing with them? The Fujitsu's A64FX Processor for example somewhat competes with Nvidia datacenter GPUs. What incentive would Nvidia have to continue to develop the Arm Scalable Vector Extension? The only good thing from this sale would be the pivot to RISC-V.
- lunfard000 5y ago
  Money? like Samsung selling their chips to Apple. Nvidia have a lot of proprietary stuff which allows them to get away even with inferior hardware. Nvidia will prob lose the AI datacenter market anyways, customs asics will just use RISC-V if Nvidia try to stop them.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    Nvidia doesn't care about secondary money. They're all about integrating stuff and denying others to do so. Nvidia is a castle because of the moats they've built. Not because they're leaps and bounds ahead in terms of silicon and technical wizardry. They shunned OpenCL, they'll probably shun Vulkan for GPGPU and make sure that people are locked to CUDA and its ecosystem. They have no intention to play fair. We're going to see how Mellanox will evolve under their command.
    - lunfard000 5y ago
      wasn't OpenCL a mess even on AMD cards and isnt it almost deprecated?* And Nvidia's OpenGL drivers on windows are way better than AMD's. I dont like Nvidia especially after all the error 43 bullshit, but they are competent. Now ARM is going public, wont that make things even worse? [0]:https://www.reddit.com/r/realAMD/comments/qujwas/amd_drops_opencl_for_rocm_hip_cuda_equivalent_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/realAMD/comments/qujwas/amd_drops_o...
    - paulmd 5y ago
      > They shunned OpenCL, they'll probably shun Vulkan for GPGPU this comment is factually untrue and anyone can check it for themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#Conformant_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL#Conformant_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan#Intel,_Nvidia_and_AMD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan#Intel,_Nvidia_and_AMD it would be absolutely insane not to support either of those features. An absolute shit-ton of games use Vulkan these days, there is zero chance of that being deprecated in any timespan not measured in decades. Everyone is still supporting OpenGL after all, and that's like what, an early 90s API? there is a larger point to be made here about some of the reflexively negative responses people have when the N-word is brought up. There are certainly criticisms you can make of NVIDIA, but people have this intense and reflexively negative emotional response that tends to slide these discussions into flamewar territory. I know I'm about to hear about how Linus gave them the finger (cause he's a totally balanced and wholesome person), but providing a closed-source linux driver and not supporting wayland (which I think they did eventually anyway?) aren't the end of the world like people make them out to be. Pick the product that fits your needs, if not move on, you don't need to become emotionally attached and you can keep your positions fact-based.
shmerl 5y ago
Nvidia also has a long track record of anti-competitive behavior. So it's a good thing they didn't get ARM.
- snvzz 5y ago
  >So it's a good thing they didn't get ARM. It doesn't matter, as the damage is done. Once the industry caught a whiff of NVIDIA's intent to purchase ARM, they looked for alternatives. That's RISC-V. Today, it's been years and the RISC-V efforts within the industry have advanced considerably. These won't be dropped now, irrespective of ARM's fate.
- chasil 5y ago
  There is nothing to prevent NVidia from buying stock. A lot of stock.
  - shmerl 5y ago
    Shouldn't be nothing, otherwise anti-trust has some major hole.
karmasimida 5y ago
Well money speaks, who would own them? The ones actually are willing to pay the price. It is not other people's say unfortunately.
einpoklum 5y ago
> Nvidia have a good track record creating good products. And a bad track record of preventing interoperability and cross-vendor standardization, to lock customers in.

odiroot 5y ago

*fewer. Sorry had to do it.