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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

#41

Post by toomuchtodo »

nightcracker wrote: post #39

This is just a blatant attempt to sell the exact same product to two different types of customers at different prices based on their (presumed) willingness to spend. Actually it's worse. It's an attempt to cripple a perfectly functioning cheap product aimed at a different audience (gamers) for another audience (machine learning folks) in order to drive them to more expensive products that do the same thing. Pure gree…

You’re going be surprised how CPUs are price segmented in that case (they’re cut from the same wafers and priced by the clock frequency QA validates at).

Price semgnentation isn’t necessarily bad; you want to segment your product in order to maximize revenue across all possible customers; this is just a more egregious/bold attempt at doing so (and is hopefully prevented by a court).

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

#42

Post by wmf »

freeone3000 wrote: post #29
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 fal…

In the future, Teslas will have Tensor Cores and GeForces won't, so deep learning will be much faster (but also much more expensive, so it kind of cancels out) on Tesla cards.

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

#44

Post by [deleted] »

sabalaba wrote: post #15
jacquesm wrote: post #12

If true then Nvidia has gone nuts. There is no way that they can control what end users of their products do with their products and/or their software post download to the extent where they are going to have a say in what locality you can use their software and where not. Utterly ridiculous. For a company that has seen my solid support so far I'm extremely disappointed. Could someone fluent in Japanese please confirm…

It's true, here is the updated license: http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/licen... . Text: No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.

[deleted]

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

#45

Post by Const-me »

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 might be wrong, but doesn't modern Windows just silently installs these from windows update, without EULA or user consent?

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

#46

Post by leggomylibro »

wmf wrote: post #42
freeone3000 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fal…

In the future, Teslas will have Tensor Cores and GeForces won't, so deep learning will be much faster (but also much more expensive, so it kind of cancels out) on Tesla cards.

Yeah, doesn't it seem a little weird that they seem to want to enforce the distinction between gaming and industrial cards, but they also went ahead and included tensor cores in that new Titan card?

Did they not think that through and have an 'oh shit' moment when they saw all the news articles or something? Or is this a 'the first hit is free' sort of deal where they want people to learn about using the product on a startup budget, without giving up the ability to squeeze if someone has a good idea and wants to scale?

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

#47

Post by solomatov »

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…

IANAL, but in the law there's a thing which is called Contra proferentem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem Basically, it means that ambiguous terms are interpreted against the contract drafter.

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

#48

Post by solomatov »

wmf wrote: post #42
freeone3000 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fal…

In the future, Teslas will have Tensor Cores and GeForces won't, so deep learning will be much faster (but also much more expensive, so it kind of cancels out) on Tesla cards.

Are you sure that they won't do it? Did they mention it somehow?

AFAIU, tensor cores are just super efficient matrix operations, and they might super useful in gaming applications, for example, physics engines.

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

#49

Post by bubblethink »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #41
nightcracker wrote: post #39

This is just a blatant attempt to sell the exact same product to two different types of customers at different prices based on their (presumed) willingness to spend. Actually it's worse. It's an attempt to cripple a perfectly functioning cheap product aimed at a different audience (gamers) for another audience (machine learning folks) in order to drive them to more expensive products that do the same thing. Pure gree…

You’re going be surprised how CPUs are price segmented in that case (they’re cut from the same wafers and priced by the clock frequency QA validates at). Price semgnentation isn’t necessarily bad; you want to segment your product in order to maximize revenue across all possible customers; this is just a more egregious/bold attempt at doing so (and is hopefully prevented by a court).

NVIDIA already does some form of segmentation with Quadro cards (i.e., artificially crippling things in driver/firmware). They have complete control over firmware, drivers and CUDA. More than the EULA, it's likely that they'll differentiate in software. For eg., CuDNN may stop working on GeForce, or some rubbish like that.

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

#50

Post by caf »

If they manage to stick this - which is a big if - wouldn't that just cause a major pivot of interest to ML on AMD? Sure, OpenCL is very much the poor cousin right now, but an 8x cost hike is a pretty strong incentive to look around for your Best Alternative Elsewhere.
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