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Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

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Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#21

Post by jacquesm »

f1notformula1 wrote: post #14
jo909 wrote: post #3

This is the relevant change in the EULA you need to accept when downloading (installing?) the GeForce driver. The article is weirdly translated, this is apparently a global NVIDIA thing and not specific to "NVIDIA Japan". > No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted. Edit: http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload…

I'm not a legal expert and don't understand EULAs at all. I expected a "Datacenter" to be defined at some point but I didn't see a definition in the EULA. How should one interpret this? Is a research cluster a datacenter? How about a rack of a few dozen machines I built by hand? I've been in university research groups that had both options. Somewhat maddening to have a single line in the EULA that's so open to interp…

When you're not a legal expert and you feel like you are about to maybe break a term in someone else's license agreement the right avenue is to consult your company or university legal department.

Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#22

Post by jameskegel »

m3kw9 wrote: post #8

I can see the reason they are making this move is because the supply of GeForce Video cards is being used up for things other than Graphics duty like mining block chains or AI training. It’s probably a desperate supply move

Unless we're talking about the Tesla cards, nVidia is about the worst of the GPU class as far as mining goes. Nobody uses it aside from people who are exceedingly frugal to their own detriment. There is a reason why their prices aren't scaling linearly with the mining boom like AMD, because they are not as good as AMD in most cases.

Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#23

Post by jacquesm »

vinayan3 wrote: post #4

For the longest time they have encouraged people to use Geforce cards for doing machine learning. Now they are changing the licensing and making it not okay for data centers is not gonna sit well with people. Especially with the carveout for Bitcoin miners. The number of customers who are impacted like the article points out will be mainly universities. This is bad move overall and isn't gonna gain them any good will…

The exemption makes it even more ridiculous, not only do they want to restrict where you can use the software but they also want to have a say in what kind of applications you can use their software for.

This besides the fact that Bitcoin on GPUs is fairly dead, it's almost entirely done on ASICs now.

If you read the license agreement it states that the term applies to 'blockchain processing', not to bitcoin specifically.

Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#24

Post by mickronome »

m3kw9 wrote: post #8

I can see the reason they are making this move is because the supply of GeForce Video cards is being used up for things other than Graphics duty like mining block chains or AI training. It’s probably a desperate supply move

While I think it's probably part of the reason, if it was the only reason there are bound to be other less customer hostile ways of solving that particular problem.

Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#28

Post by jo909 »

f1notformula1 wrote: post #14
jo909 wrote: post #3

This is the relevant change in the EULA you need to accept when downloading (installing?) the GeForce driver. The article is weirdly translated, this is apparently a global NVIDIA thing and not specific to "NVIDIA Japan". > No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted. Edit: http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload…

I'm not a legal expert and don't understand EULAs at all. I expected a "Datacenter" to be defined at some point but I didn't see a definition in the EULA. How should one interpret this? Is a research cluster a datacenter? How about a rack of a few dozen machines I built by hand? I've been in university research groups that had both options. Somewhat maddening to have a single line in the EULA that's so open to interp…

They don't want commercial cloud and bare metal and "machine learning as a service" platforms to be based on GeForce cards. Such a service is either insignificant in it's size, or based in a Datacenter.

I would not stress about this on my own hardware for my personal or company internal use, even if it is a full rack or more in a Datacenter. Nvidia is not going to be able to tell the difference to a rack in my basement.

Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#29

Post by freeone3000 »

matt4711 wrote: post #11

I thought the NVIDIA drivers for the more fancy cards (TITAN etc) are the same as for the gforce cards. Wouldn't this restriction apply to those cards as well? Doesn't make much sense to me...

They can't price-differentiate FP64 compute out, since ML uses FP32 or even FP16. They tried discriminating FP16 performance but frameworks switched to using FP32 units and downconverting to FP16 after. They can't kill FP32 performance since that's used for gaming. They tried killing the virtualization, they tried differentiating based on clustering, they tried every reasonable technical procedure. So now they're falling back to legal means, to defend an artificial price distinction that has no reflection in card features that anyone cares about.
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