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NVidia will license their GPU cores to other hardware manufacturers
- orik 13y agoThis is a pretty big deal. Excited to see what sorta devices come of it.
- subb 13y agoSo, what does this mean exactly? They will license the design of the GPU cores so others will be able to build the chip themselves?
- sliverstorm 13y agoIf I had to guess, I'd say they provide an IP to the customer. Depending on the size and budget of the customer, they offer a premade IP, or semi-custom IP.
- qb45 13y agoNo, it's about letting others integrate NVIDIA GPUs into their CPUs/SoCs/etc.
- antonyme 13y agoI expect they will do very much what Imagination Tech does now with their PowerVR graphics cores. License them to SOC designers who integrate them with a CPU (invariably ARM) and other peripheral cores (eg. DSP, Ethernet, I/O, etc) and then get someone like TSMC or Samsung to fab the silicon (since most chip designers are fabless).
- sho_hn 13y agoI wonder what this will mean for free drivers. While nVidia hasn't been entirely uncooperative (they do participate in X.org upstream development to the degree that it affects their products), the only free driver they've written for the line of GPUs the to-be-licensed Kepler core is part of is an obfuscated, 2D-only token effort, and they have stayed away from participating in the Nouveau project to write a fully-featured free driver. Contrast that with Intel and AMD, where the free driver is the primary effort or one supported with documentation, code and manpower, respectively. On the other hand, they've contracted Avionic Design to write a free 3D-enabled driver for the GPUs in their Tegra 3 SoCs. If future Tegra is based on a Kepler derivative (as indicated by the blog), and this prior commitment forces them to release a free driver for it as well, I wonder if one day this hypothetical free driver might have a shot at replacing their closed source codebase. Or they could join forces with Nouveau and finally put some of their resources behind it, similar to what AMD has done.
- vacri 13y agoContrasting with AMD, the AMD drivers are a complete mess. I have a card that was released about a year ago (HD7800) and I can't dual-screen on it with the AMD drivers (maximum total resolution is 1920x1920 - yes, that's not a typo). Regardless of effort, the graphics drivers AMD produce are terrible, and the free version doesn't deal well in the gap (pitcairn chipset). I would not be pointing at AMD as a role model in this regard.
- sho_hn 13y agoI wasn't. I agree that the closed-source drivers AMD also still produce are friggin' terrible, and far worse than nVidia's closed-source drivers. AMD has been much better about supporting efforts to write free drivers than nVidia has, however. In terms of serving as role model I'd say Intel takes the lead by actually developing their sole drivers out in the open _and_ releasing hardware documentation so others outside the company can help out. Even Intel as had their missteps however (e.g. the infamous Poulsbo driver mess).
- pjmlp 13y ago
- willvarfar 13y agoDoes this mean that NVidia is moving towards being an ARM instead of an Apple?
- acchow 13y agoDo you think ZF is like BMW?
- reeses 13y agoIs Rolls-Royce like Boeing? This is a fun game.
- Guvante 13y agoNVidia hasn't sold direct to customers in years, so comparing them to Apple is a bit odd. The distinction now is that in addition to buying fabricated chips, you can license the GPUs directly so you can manufacture in tighter ways.
- stefanve 13y agoI think this could be big especially in the mobile space. I can imagine that smaller ARM manufactures/designers will use this over PowerVR or there own graphics implantation. In desktop space I don't see any one willing to do that, maybe IBM for a super computer. But while this is exiting I think it also shows that they don't see a very bright future for them self. I guess with there less then hard selling ARM proc and the increasingly better graphics chips from intel the need for nvdia as a h/w manufacture is declining fast
- aspensmonster 13y agoSo... They want to get out of the business of actually making things and just sell IP cores now?
- sho_hn 13y agoThey've never really been in the business of "making things" as end-users would see it. They've designed chips and reference PCBs, but they contract outside foundries for manufacturing (unlike, say, Intel, who have their own fabs) and the silicon goes to retail partners like ASUS and Gainward and many others to actually put into the channel (with minor downstream customization like custom heatsink designs). They've only recently actually sold some things directly to customers, like the SHIELD gaming handheld.
- Eyght 13y agoIt will be interesting to see if anyone will use their GPU's for a product that directly competes with the SHIELD.
- sho_hn 13y agoI'd say SHIELD is pretty much a PR effort to incite others to do exactly that - it creates buzz around the virtues of nVidia's mobile tech for gaming, and so could make licensing nVidia GPU IP an attractive selling point. I don't think nVidia expects SHIELD to be a high-volume seller on its own, it's pretty niche form factor-wise. This is also why you have a bunch of graphically intense games on the Play store which are Tegra-exclusives, from developers who cut a deal with nVidia. For example Arma Tactics.
- abuzzooz 13y agoTo be fair, NVIDIA tried to sell a couple of products directly to end consumers before. For example they sold a dual tv tuner card a few years ago (http://www.nvidia.com/page/dualtvmce.html http://www.nvidia.com/page/dualtvmce.html), but it didn't go too well and was discontinued. These were always half-hearted attempts at testing the waters. NVIDIA never really put too much effort into it.
- mtgx 13y agoThis is the right strategy for Nvidia, especially in the mobile space, considering they'll also be the only ones with the full OpenGL 4.3 support, which means that if Kepler GPU's are popular, developers will be making some pretty amazing mobile games that will only be available on Kepler GPU's because they'll be the only ones to have OpenGL 4.3 for years to come. I only wish this was Maxwell coming out next year, not Kepler, which was supposed to be in Tegra 4, but you know Nvidia and their delays...I also hope they don't screw this up by making the GPU very inefficient. If they do that, no one will want it, so this strategy will be irrelevant. They say it's very efficient, but over the years I've become a lot more skeptical about stuff Nvidia claims, at least in the mobile space. If they can convince Samsung to use Kepler for Exynos 6, or Maxwell for Exynos 7, that would be a huge win for them. Samsung has been a little lost lately in terms of what GPU's to use in Exynos SoC's, so this may be Nvidia's window of opportunity, if they can prove their GPU is the best.
- iffyuva 13y agotalking about mobile space, i believe OpenGLES is used in embedded platforms instead of OpenGL, which is a stripped down version.
- nitrogen 13y agoOnly because it's easier to support OpenGL ES. If a GPU is available that supports full OpenGL, that would give greater flexibility features to mobile developers.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoNot many would use full OpenGL, which is optimized for CAD developers. The ES subset actually represents modern programming practices, with only a few extensions missing for the more recent features of the pipeline (hull shaders and such).
- mtgx 13y agoOpenGL ES 3.0 lacks geometry shader support, which means it's behind even DirectX 10 a bit. OpenGL 4.3 received full backwards compatibility with OpenGL ES 3.0, so developers can still only develop for OpenGL ES 3.0 if that's what they want. But depending on how popular Kepler GPU's get in mobile, and if it's worth their time, they can use extra features in their games for those devices. I think OpenGL 4.3 support would be a lot more helpful in making cross-platform games that work pretty much the same (but on a different scale of performance, of course) on both PC's and tablets, such as Battlefields 3 (the demo seems recorded so the video quality is not great): http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/11/nvidia-shows-off-stunning-graphics-with-kepler-mobile-chip/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/11/nvidia-shows-off-stunning-... I also wouldn't be surprised if Epic Games ports the (mobile) Unreal Engine 4 to mobile Kepler-based chips, first. EA seems to be doing that with Frostbite already: http://www.phonearena.com/news/EAs-Battlefield-and-Need-for-Speed-game-engine-coming-to-iOS-and-Android_id43033 http://www.phonearena.com/news/EAs-Battlefield-and-Need-for-...
- trippy_biscuits 13y agoSo now, projects that need parallel crypto-cracking can use GPGPUs instead of FPGAs. This works with any other strategic GPGPU application as well. The military no longer needs to buy a bunch of Sony gear just for the CPU. Defense contractors or grant-funded university research departments can design and use a GPGPU solution and have more control and customization than using off the shelf parts.
- geuis 13y agoCan someone explain the inner workings of this part of the industry? So I know enough about graphics cards to make smart buying choices, but I don't know anything about the business. The biggest question is how is this different than gpu's now? I can get the same model of card from EVGA, Nvidia, BFG, etc. I go with the one with best reviews and lowest price.
- leoedin 13y agoThis is about the silicon rather than the unit. Currently third party GPUs are manufactured using Nvidia-manufactured GPU chips. Nvidia sells these and manfuacturers will use their reference design, perhaps with modification, to produce a functional GPU. What is being discussed in the link is actually licensing the GPU design itself, which would allow other companies to fabricate their own Nvidia GPU containing chips. This allows third parties to produce system on a chip designs (SoC) which incorporate Nvidia GPUs connected to other stuff, perhaps a few ARM cores or some custom DSPs or similar. This is the approach that ARM currently take with their designs. They don't operate any fabs, but simply sell what's known as the "IP Core" to third parties (Qualcomm, Broadcom, Texas Instruments etc...)
- geuis 13y agoThanks, that makes a lot of sense.
- _pmf_ 13y agoThis could increase the competition in the right way, i.e. without further fragmenting APIs / ABIs.
- pjmlp 13y agoMaybe Intel could license them and finally provide proper GPUs.
- slacka 13y agoWhile they're at it open-source the nVidia Linux drivers. And end war and poverty.
- pjmlp 13y agoOpen source does not matter if they aren't able to deliver the performance professional developers require.
- Narishma 13y agoNvidia's Linux driver is more or less the same as their Windows (and MacOS, etc...) driver. They can't just open source it. Intel has an open source Linux driver and a closed source Windows driver.
- antonyme 13y agoMy first thought too. They have sunk an awful lot of money into GPUs without ever delivering a really competitive offering. And then there was Larrabee...
- pjmlp 13y agoI attended a Larrabee session at Games Developer Conference Europe 2009, only to see the project get dumped an year later. Now they have Xeon Phi, but wonder if it ever matter for games.
- n00b101 13y agoXeon Phi is not for games. It could theoretically be used for accelerated software rendering but it does not have any video hardware (such as a DVI output connector).
- ldng 13y agoFeel like the next logical step. They're already customizing chips for PC constructors (I remember not being able not being able to install a linux on an HP laptop because the customized chip wasn't compatible with drivers). So the next step is just delegating the chip manufacturing.
- Aissen 13y agoIt's not customizing, it's just configuration. Have a look at http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/9243-forceware-updaters-quickstart-guide/ http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/9243-forceware-update...
- venomsnake 13y agoHow power efficient are they? With mobile devices moving almost as many pixels as desktop PCs nowadays it will be a power drain.
- antonyme 13y agoNot sure, but the latest Tegra offering has some surprisingly impressive performance/watt figures. (I attended an NVidia roadshow a while back, but don't have the brochures here.)
- antonyme 13y agoThis is hugely significant. The No.1 GPU vendor in the PC market has seen the writing on the wall, and is not standing still. They clearly see the PC market in decline, and mobile/embedded is the way of the future, with Android as the dominant platform. Compare this to only a few years ago, when the Wintel duopoly reigned supreme. For years, people have been talking about Linux taking on Windows on the desktop, but it hasn't really materialised. However, Linux has done something far more significant - leapfrogged the humble PC and become the platform upon which both so many Internet services and mobile devices are built. Exciting times...
- cookiecaper 13y agoI wouldn't take it to mean that PCs are in decline. I would just take it to mean that nVidia recognizes mobile isn't going away, and that there is a lot of money to be made there. That's doesn't necessarily mandate the death of the PC. I don't think that anyone expects smartphones to disappear, and I'm still puzzled as to why so many are so anxious to see their counterpart machines that can facilitate serious work (or play, for that matter) go away.
- bashinator 13y agoI think the idea is that there are orders of magnitude more content consumers, than content creators. To a greater and greater extent, mobile devices are fully capable of displaying all the content you might want (tellingly, the exception being high-end 3D games). Once traditional PCs are only useful for content creators, the economy of scale for manufacturing those systems may no longer apply.
- shmerl 13y agoIs Nvidia going to release EGL drivers for the desktop to enable Wayland? They wrote a lot about Android there, but didn't say anything about this.
- wmf 13y agoMagic 8 Ball says "try running SurfaceFlinger or Mir on all ARM desktop machines so you can reuse Android drivers".
- shmerl 13y agoI'm not really interested in either Mir or SurfaceFlinger. Wayland on native glibc EGL drivers, that's something already. Besides, Mir is relying on the same drivers that Wayland does, so they are facing the same issue.
- abuzzooz 13y agoThe way I see it, this will directly cannibalize Tegra sales. Up to and including Tegra 4, NVIDIA's mobile GPUs weren't based on their desktop GPU technology. Starting with the next-gen Tegras, they will have a Kepler-based (and later a Maxwell-based) GPU in their mobile SoCs, architected from scratch to be power-efficient. That will be a big deal. Imagine running CUDA apps in the palm of your hand. But with this step, it seems to me that Tegra will not have any differentiator any more (unless NVIDIA keeps some features to itself). Could NVIDIA be adopting ARM's strategy?