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Nvidia became the biggest company on earth in part thanks to closed source drivers, allowing them to invest more into software.

chmod775 2y ago
Nvidia isn't even in the top 50 of largest companies by any sensible metric.
- bmacho 2y ago
  https://companiesmarketcap.com/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/ By market cap, nvidia is the 3rd biggest one, about as big as google and facebook together. Market cap is a sensible metric.
  - hajile 2y ago
    Market cap for tech companies is a bubble. It has more in common with the lottery total than with a representation of real value.
  - chmod775 2y ago
    Then I guess Rhodium is the largest metal and the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is the largest building in Britain. If you conflate value with size, both terms become near useless. Value can only mean something in relation to something else. Picture this: You have a large company with thousands of employees having similar revenue to their competitor, which accomplishes the same with one employee and a much smaller operation. Which one is likely to be more valuable? Obviously the smaller one. If we however conflate value with size, as is so often done in popular economics, just pointing out this single fact becomes a complicated exercise of having to carefully employ language that we neutered for no good reason at all. Not to speak of all the misunderstandings this is going to create with people who aren't used to this imprecise use of the English language. If you mean revenue, say revenue, if you mean value, say value, if you mean size, say size. Don't use "large" to say "valuable". Why would you do that if there's a perfectly good word already? Imprecise language is often used to either confuse or leave open an avenue to cover one's ass later... which brings us back to popular economics.
    - quesera 2y ago
      "Size" is unitless, so I disagree with your rationale. Precision is always helpful, but valuation is a very common size metric, and there was no confusion about OP's meaning.
      - chmod775 2y ago
        > "Size" is unitless, so I disagree with your rationale. You're going to have to expand that a little bit. > valuation is a very common size metric It's not a size metric. A world where things grow larger the more people value them might be interesting though. > and there was no confusion about OP's meaning. Their comment makes much less sense if you replace "biggest" with "most valuable". It's trivially obvious that the correlation between valuation and how much a company can invest into software is incredibly weak if it exists at all. On software development spending NVidia is eclipsed by many companies with sometimes only a fraction of its valuation. So either it's a non sequitur or we are incorrectly assuming that Nvidia became the largest company.
        bmacho 2y ago
        > A world where things grow larger the more people value them might be interesting though. Do you personally grow larger when you have more money in the bank? When more of your friends get elected in the senate? When you hire someone? When you buy a new house?
        chmod775 2y ago
        Obviously not?
        quesera 2y ago
        "Size" is not only a metric of physical dimension. OP said "biggest", and meant "largest valuation". This happens to be incorrect -- nVidia was never the highest-valued public company -- but they were the second-largest, and came very close to first. If you did not know what OP meant immediately from awareness of business news, you still should have considered "valuation" as one of the obvious possibilities. If you did not, then you might be lacking adequate context for this conversation, and might be better served by asking questions instead of demonstrating your confusion via misplaced pedantry.
account42 2y ago
What is your reason for believing the closed source nature of nVidia's graphics drivers played a role in their success? AMD's and Intels Windows drivers are also closed source and so were AMD's Linux drivers when nVidia managed to secure the lead. nVidia is also finally moving to an open source kernel module so a closed source one doesn't seem important to them for keeping their moat.
- michaelt 2y ago
  Presumably amadeuspagel means nvidia has walked a careful line with CUDA & ML. CUDA is much more accessible/documented/available than a lot of comparable products. FPGAs were even more closed, more expensive and had much worse documentation. Things like compute clusters were call-for-pricing, prepare to spend as much as a small house. On the other hand, CUDA is closed enough the chips that run it aren't a commodity. If you want to download that existing ML project and run it on your AMD card - someone will have to do the leg work to port it. That means they've been able to invest quite a lot of $$$ into CUDA, knowing the spending gets them a competitive advantage.
bayindirh 2y ago
nVidia built this bubble by playing dirty on many fronts. Their Windows drivers are a black box which doesn't conform to many of the standards, or behave the way they see fit, esp. about memory management and data transfers. GameWorks library actively sabotaged AMD cards (not unlike Intel's infamous compiler saga). Many nVidia optimized games either ran on completely unoptimized or outright AMD/ATI hostile code-paths. e.g.: GTA3 ran silky smooth on an nVidia Geforce MX400 (bottom of the barrel card) while thrice powerful ATI cards stuttered. Only a handful of studios (kudos to Valve) optimized engines for both and showed that a "paltry" 9600XT can do HDR@60FPS. On Datacenter front, they actively undermined OpenCL and other engine by aritifically performance-capping them (you can use only one DMA controller in Tesla cards, which actually have three DMA engines), slowing down memory transfers and removing ability to stream in/out of the card. They "supported" versions of OpenCL, but made it impossible to compile on their hardware, except OpenCL 1.1. On driver front, they have a signed firmware mechanism, and they provide a seriously limited firmware to nouveau just to enable their hardware. You can't use any advanced features of their cards, because the full-capability firmware refuses to work with nouveau. Also, they re not opening their kernel module. Secret sauce is moving to firmware, leaving an open interfacing module. CUDA, GL and everything is closed source. On the other hand, they actively said that "The docs of the cards are in the open. We neither help, nor sabotage nouveau driver project. They're free", while cooking a limited firmware for these guys. They bought Mellanox, the sole infiniband supplier to vertically integrate. Wonder how they will cripple the IB stack with licenses and such now. They're the Microsoft of hardware world. They're greedy, and don't hesitate to make dirty moves to dominate the market. Because of what they did, I neither respect nor like them.

chmod775 2y ago

Nvidia isn't even in the top 50 of largest companies by any sensible metric.

bmacho 2y ago
https://companiesmarketcap.com/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/ By market cap, nvidia is the 3rd biggest one, about as big as google and facebook together. Market cap is a sensible metric.
- hajile 2y ago
  Market cap for tech companies is a bubble. It has more in common with the lottery total than with a representation of real value.
- chmod775 2y ago
  Then I guess Rhodium is the largest metal and the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is the largest building in Britain. If you conflate value with size, both terms become near useless. Value can only mean something in relation to something else. Picture this: You have a large company with thousands of employees having similar revenue to their competitor, which accomplishes the same with one employee and a much smaller operation. Which one is likely to be more valuable? Obviously the smaller one. If we however conflate value with size, as is so often done in popular economics, just pointing out this single fact becomes a complicated exercise of having to carefully employ language that we neutered for no good reason at all. Not to speak of all the misunderstandings this is going to create with people who aren't used to this imprecise use of the English language. If you mean revenue, say revenue, if you mean value, say value, if you mean size, say size. Don't use "large" to say "valuable". Why would you do that if there's a perfectly good word already? Imprecise language is often used to either confuse or leave open an avenue to cover one's ass later... which brings us back to popular economics.
  - quesera 2y ago
    "Size" is unitless, so I disagree with your rationale. Precision is always helpful, but valuation is a very common size metric, and there was no confusion about OP's meaning.
    - chmod775 2y ago
      > "Size" is unitless, so I disagree with your rationale. You're going to have to expand that a little bit. > valuation is a very common size metric It's not a size metric. A world where things grow larger the more people value them might be interesting though. > and there was no confusion about OP's meaning. Their comment makes much less sense if you replace "biggest" with "most valuable". It's trivially obvious that the correlation between valuation and how much a company can invest into software is incredibly weak if it exists at all. On software development spending NVidia is eclipsed by many companies with sometimes only a fraction of its valuation. So either it's a non sequitur or we are incorrectly assuming that Nvidia became the largest company.
      - bmacho 2y ago
        > A world where things grow larger the more people value them might be interesting though. Do you personally grow larger when you have more money in the bank? When more of your friends get elected in the senate? When you hire someone? When you buy a new house?
        chmod775 2y ago
        Obviously not?
      - quesera 2y ago
        "Size" is not only a metric of physical dimension. OP said "biggest", and meant "largest valuation". This happens to be incorrect -- nVidia was never the highest-valued public company -- but they were the second-largest, and came very close to first. If you did not know what OP meant immediately from awareness of business news, you still should have considered "valuation" as one of the obvious possibilities. If you did not, then you might be lacking adequate context for this conversation, and might be better served by asking questions instead of demonstrating your confusion via misplaced pedantry.

account42 2y ago

What is your reason for believing the closed source nature of nVidia's graphics drivers played a role in their success? AMD's and Intels Windows drivers are also closed source and so were AMD's Linux drivers when nVidia managed to secure the lead. nVidia is also finally moving to an open source kernel module so a closed source one doesn't seem important to them for keeping their moat.

michaelt 2y ago
Presumably amadeuspagel means nvidia has walked a careful line with CUDA & ML. CUDA is much more accessible/documented/available than a lot of comparable products. FPGAs were even more closed, more expensive and had much worse documentation. Things like compute clusters were call-for-pricing, prepare to spend as much as a small house. On the other hand, CUDA is closed enough the chips that run it aren't a commodity. If you want to download that existing ML project and run it on your AMD card - someone will have to do the leg work to port it. That means they've been able to invest quite a lot of $$$ into CUDA, knowing the spending gets them a competitive advantage.

bayindirh 2y ago

nVidia built this bubble by playing dirty on many fronts. Their Windows drivers are a black box which doesn't conform to many of the standards, or behave the way they see fit, esp. about memory management and data transfers. GameWorks library actively sabotaged AMD cards (not unlike Intel's infamous compiler saga). Many nVidia optimized games either ran on completely unoptimized or outright AMD/ATI hostile code-paths. e.g.: GTA3 ran silky smooth on an nVidia Geforce MX400 (bottom of the barrel card) while thrice powerful ATI cards stuttered. Only a handful of studios (kudos to Valve) optimized engines for both and showed that a "paltry" 9600XT can do HDR@60FPS. On Datacenter front, they actively undermined OpenCL and other engine by aritifically performance-capping them (you can use only one DMA controller in Tesla cards, which actually have three DMA engines), slowing down memory transfers and removing ability to stream in/out of the card. They "supported" versions of OpenCL, but made it impossible to compile on their hardware, except OpenCL 1.1. On driver front, they have a signed firmware mechanism, and they provide a seriously limited firmware to nouveau just to enable their hardware. You can't use any advanced features of their cards, because the full-capability firmware refuses to work with nouveau. Also, they re not opening their kernel module. Secret sauce is moving to firmware, leaving an open interfacing module. CUDA, GL and everything is closed source. On the other hand, they actively said that "The docs of the cards are in the open. We neither help, nor sabotage nouveau driver project. They're free", while cooking a limited firmware for these guys. They bought Mellanox, the sole infiniband supplier to vertically integrate. Wonder how they will cripple the IB stack with licenses and such now. They're the Microsoft of hardware world. They're greedy, and don't hesitate to make dirty moves to dominate the market. Because of what they did, I neither respect nor like them.