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I personally prefer the hardware companies making just hardware. Keeps the incentives pure. I'm even willing to accept a 20% performance hit for this requirem

I personally prefer the hardware companies making just hardware. Keeps the incentives pure. I'm even willing to accept a 20% performance hit for this requirement, should someone bring that up.

jack_tripper 1y ago
>I personally prefer the hardware companies making just hardware. Keeps the incentives pure. That's self contradictory. Their incentive is to sell more HW and at higher prices using whatever shady practices they can get away with, software or no software. There's nothing pure about that, it's just business. High end chips aren't commodity HW like lawnmowers, they can't function without the right SW. And this isn't the 90's anymore when Hercules or S3 would only make the silicon, and then system integrators would write the drivers for it which was basically MS-DOS calls to read/write to registers via the PCI bus, by the devs reading a 300 page manual, those days are long gone. Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it to extract the most performance out of it. >I'm even willing to accept a 20% performance hit for this requirement, should someone bring that up. I'm also willing to accept arbitrary numbers I make up, as a tradeoff, but the market does not work like that.
- amelius 1y ago
  > Their incentive is to sell more HW and at higher prices using whatever shady practices they can get away with, software or no software. And you don't think these shady practices will leak into the software? > Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it... The hardware people at the manufacturer are not the software people. So there __must__ be documentation.
  - jack_tripper 1y ago
    >So there __must__ be documentation. YES, internal documentation, full of proprietary IP.
    - amelius 1y ago
      But not releasing said documentation is a choice. And that goes against my original point.
- arcbyte 1y ago
  > the market does not work like that. That depends on whether OP is buying/renting AMD gpu machines.
  - jack_tripper 1y ago
    Can you elaborate on that?
- LeifCarrotson 1y ago
  > ...by the devs reading a 300 page manual, those days are long gone. Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it... The 300 page manual would be 3,000 or 30,000 pages long, if modern ARM ISR manuals are any indication. Independent developers could totally write performant drivers if they had the documents, but those manuals do not exist - or if they do, they're proprietary.
  - bigbadfeline 1y ago
    > Independent developers could totally write performant drivers if they had the documents, Surely they could, but at that complexity level, they wouldn't put the necessary amount of effort in it without being payed, and at that point, it's better to hire them. > but those manuals do not exist - or if they do, they're proprietary. And there are market-related reasons for that, it's not done because of some arbitrary paranoia. Another important issue is that good documents are hard to write - with regard to driver coding, it's much easier to make a quick call or message the hardware people about some unclear aspect of chip's operation rather than go through the formal process of modifying the official documents. Waiting for external developers to reverse engineer that is slow and leads to serious competitive disadvantages and AMD is an example of it.
    - amelius 1y ago
      > Surely they could, but at that complexity level, they wouldn't put the necessary amount of effort in it without being payed, and at that point, it's better to hire them. The assumption that no good software will be written without pay is outdated as FOSS disproved it many times over.
      - bigbadfeline 1y ago
        > The assumption that no good software will be written without pay is outdated as FOSS disproved it many times over. I think I made it clear that the necessary effort has to measure up to the complexity level, modification volume and time constraints typical for competitive GPU hardware - hasn't happened without pay for any GPU. That may change if most of the GPU drivers are moved on-chip, which should have happened earlier but there's a lot of politics involved there too, so who knows.
- MaxBarraclough 1y ago
  > nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it to extract the most performance out of it Let's not go too far here. Reverse engineering and independent development of usable drivers are not impossible, they're 'merely' extremely challenging. Alyssa Rosenzweig in particular had great success reverse engineering the Apple M1 GPU and writing drivers for it, and that was just a few years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Rosenzweig#Career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Rosenzweig#Career https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45034537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45034537
  - surajrmal 1y ago
    It's extremely expensive and you will be late to the market by at least one generation. It's not economically viable outside of hobbiest situations.
  - jack_tripper 1y ago
    The M1 launched in 2019 and FOSS drivers still not on par with MAcOS. You can't stay in business waiting for 6 years for someone else to make drivers for your HW. This is just a HN fantasy that's not compatible with business of making money. That's why everyone here make money working in SW.
    - amelius 1y ago
      > The M1 launched in 2019 and FOSS drivers still not on par with MAcOS. That's mostly because the documentation was never released. Honestly, it makes no sense to try to suggest that FOSS can't write decent software when reality shows otherwise.
tester756 1y ago
You alone is... pretty small market niche, I'd say.
- amelius 1y ago
  This is a silly thing to say. Right now there are probably thousands of hackers dying to get their hands on the M-series CPU documentation from Apple.
  - _zoltan_ 1y ago
    This thread is about DC level HW, not consumer electronics.
    - amelius 1y ago
      Apple's silicon would be used in DCs if they were more open. But sadly, Apple's offerings are a combination of hardware and software, and therefore not open by necessity.
  - tester756 1y ago
    Thousands is niche. There are tens of millions of Apple laptops with Mx CPUs sold.
andruby 1y ago
Unfortunately hardware can’t exist anymore without software. Everything non-trivial needs firmware or microcode. And depending on others to write firmware for your hardware, I don’t think that’s a recipe for success.
- amelius 1y ago
  Software team at AMD to hardware team at AMD: "Give us the hardware with the docs then we will write software for it" Hardware team at AMD: "Sorry, hardware can't exist without software; we'll first have to write the software" Software team: "But we're the software team ..." Hardware team: "Uhm yeah ... seems we have a nasty chicken and egg problem here"
_zoltan_ 1y ago
20% performance on a 10GW DC? Suuuuuuure....
- amelius 1y ago
  What do absolute numbers have to do with it?
ngcc_hk 1y ago
Is apple a hw or sw … or is that a wrong question. Why is a company has to be a hw or sw one ? If nvidia dominate because of CUDA and why it can do it but amd should not?
musebox35 1y ago
In certain contexts 20% is a lot bucks, leaving that on the plate would be very wasteful ;-)
- amelius 1y ago
  Yes, it would be 20% wasteful. But giving up freedom can be more costly. Also, the 20% would be open to further optimization by the community, so it wouldn't be that bad in practice, probably.
  - musebox35 1y ago
    In some commercial contexts with the savings from that 20%, you can buy a lot freedom and then with the freedom you bought you can make more free things :)
    - amelius 1y ago
      Could all be true, maybe, somehow. But I sleep better when my castle is not in someone else's kingdom. That alone is enough for me to accept the small performance penalty.
matt-p 1y ago
That means 25% more datacentre/grid capacity. Genuinely I think most companies are not happy to fund that, in order to save marginally in other areas.

I personally prefer the hardware companies making just hardware. Keeps the incentives pure. I'm even willing to accept a 20% performance hit for this requirement, should someone bring that up.

jack_tripper 1y ago

>I personally prefer the hardware companies making just hardware. Keeps the incentives pure. That's self contradictory. Their incentive is to sell more HW and at higher prices using whatever shady practices they can get away with, software or no software. There's nothing pure about that, it's just business. High end chips aren't commodity HW like lawnmowers, they can't function without the right SW. And this isn't the 90's anymore when Hercules or S3 would only make the silicon, and then system integrators would write the drivers for it which was basically MS-DOS calls to read/write to registers via the PCI bus, by the devs reading a 300 page manual, those days are long gone. Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it to extract the most performance out of it. >I'm even willing to accept a 20% performance hit for this requirement, should someone bring that up. I'm also willing to accept arbitrary numbers I make up, as a tradeoff, but the market does not work like that.

amelius 1y ago
> Their incentive is to sell more HW and at higher prices using whatever shady practices they can get away with, software or no software. And you don't think these shady practices will leak into the software? > Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it... The hardware people at the manufacturer are not the software people. So there __must__ be documentation.
- jack_tripper 1y ago
  >So there __must__ be documentation. YES, internal documentation, full of proprietary IP.
  - amelius 1y ago
    But not releasing said documentation is a choice. And that goes against my original point.
arcbyte 1y ago
> the market does not work like that. That depends on whether OP is buying/renting AMD gpu machines.
- jack_tripper 1y ago
  Can you elaborate on that?
LeifCarrotson 1y ago
> ...by the devs reading a 300 page manual, those days are long gone. Modern silicone is orders of magnitude more complex that nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it... The 300 page manual would be 3,000 or 30,000 pages long, if modern ARM ISR manuals are any indication. Independent developers could totally write performant drivers if they had the documents, but those manuals do not exist - or if they do, they're proprietary.
- bigbadfeline 1y ago
  > Independent developers could totally write performant drivers if they had the documents, Surely they could, but at that complexity level, they wouldn't put the necessary amount of effort in it without being payed, and at that point, it's better to hire them. > but those manuals do not exist - or if they do, they're proprietary. And there are market-related reasons for that, it's not done because of some arbitrary paranoia. Another important issue is that good documents are hard to write - with regard to driver coding, it's much easier to make a quick call or message the hardware people about some unclear aspect of chip's operation rather than go through the formal process of modifying the official documents. Waiting for external developers to reverse engineer that is slow and leads to serious competitive disadvantages and AMD is an example of it.
  - amelius 1y ago
    > Surely they could, but at that complexity level, they wouldn't put the necessary amount of effort in it without being payed, and at that point, it's better to hire them. The assumption that no good software will be written without pay is outdated as FOSS disproved it many times over.
    - bigbadfeline 1y ago
      > The assumption that no good software will be written without pay is outdated as FOSS disproved it many times over. I think I made it clear that the necessary effort has to measure up to the complexity level, modification volume and time constraints typical for competitive GPU hardware - hasn't happened without pay for any GPU. That may change if most of the GPU drivers are moved on-chip, which should have happened earlier but there's a lot of politics involved there too, so who knows.
MaxBarraclough 1y ago
> nobody else besides the manufacturer could write the drivers for it to extract the most performance out of it Let's not go too far here. Reverse engineering and independent development of usable drivers are not impossible, they're 'merely' extremely challenging. Alyssa Rosenzweig in particular had great success reverse engineering the Apple M1 GPU and writing drivers for it, and that was just a few years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Rosenzweig#Career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alyssa_Rosenzweig#Career https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45034537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45034537
- surajrmal 1y ago
  It's extremely expensive and you will be late to the market by at least one generation. It's not economically viable outside of hobbiest situations.
- jack_tripper 1y ago
  The M1 launched in 2019 and FOSS drivers still not on par with MAcOS. You can't stay in business waiting for 6 years for someone else to make drivers for your HW. This is just a HN fantasy that's not compatible with business of making money. That's why everyone here make money working in SW.
  - amelius 1y ago
    > The M1 launched in 2019 and FOSS drivers still not on par with MAcOS. That's mostly because the documentation was never released. Honestly, it makes no sense to try to suggest that FOSS can't write decent software when reality shows otherwise.

tester756 1y ago

You alone is... pretty small market niche, I'd say.

amelius 1y ago
This is a silly thing to say. Right now there are probably thousands of hackers dying to get their hands on the M-series CPU documentation from Apple.
- _zoltan_ 1y ago
  This thread is about DC level HW, not consumer electronics.
  - amelius 1y ago
    Apple's silicon would be used in DCs if they were more open. But sadly, Apple's offerings are a combination of hardware and software, and therefore not open by necessity.
- tester756 1y ago
  Thousands is niche. There are tens of millions of Apple laptops with Mx CPUs sold.

andruby 1y ago

Unfortunately hardware can’t exist anymore without software. Everything non-trivial needs firmware or microcode. And depending on others to write firmware for your hardware, I don’t think that’s a recipe for success.

amelius 1y ago
Software team at AMD to hardware team at AMD: "Give us the hardware with the docs then we will write software for it" Hardware team at AMD: "Sorry, hardware can't exist without software; we'll first have to write the software" Software team: "But we're the software team ..." Hardware team: "Uhm yeah ... seems we have a nasty chicken and egg problem here"

_zoltan_ 1y ago

20% performance on a 10GW DC? Suuuuuuure....

amelius 1y ago
What do absolute numbers have to do with it?

ngcc_hk 1y ago

Is apple a hw or sw … or is that a wrong question. Why is a company has to be a hw or sw one ? If nvidia dominate because of CUDA and why it can do it but amd should not?

musebox35 1y ago

In certain contexts 20% is a lot bucks, leaving that on the plate would be very wasteful ;-)

amelius 1y ago
Yes, it would be 20% wasteful. But giving up freedom can be more costly. Also, the 20% would be open to further optimization by the community, so it wouldn't be that bad in practice, probably.
- musebox35 1y ago
  In some commercial contexts with the savings from that 20%, you can buy a lot freedom and then with the freedom you bought you can make more free things :)
  - amelius 1y ago
    Could all be true, maybe, somehow. But I sleep better when my castle is not in someone else's kingdom. That alone is enough for me to accept the small performance penalty.

matt-p 1y ago

That means 25% more datacentre/grid capacity. Genuinely I think most companies are not happy to fund that, in order to save marginally in other areas.