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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

#51

Post by xigency »

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).

Binning CPUs on clock frequency or number of functioning cores is a bit different. If you compared it to a precious metal, the higher price CPUs have fewer imperfections, therefore they cost more. The fact that they carry different product numbers is a bit misleading but the price segmentation actually makes sense.

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by lathiat »

Realistically, this change is most likely aimed at "forcing" the hand of very large companies to co-operate with using Tesla instead of GeForce-based stuff.

Think Amazon, Large Supercomputers, etc. They probably won't care or chase the smaller folks (be careful if you get too big though :-)

I wonder if these terms are also on the Linux downloads?

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

#54

Post by j_s »

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…

If this is just a software licensing change maybe the OSS stuff will gain momentum!

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

#55

Post by nightski »

forgotpassagan wrote: post #5

In good news, this may finally force a court case around EULA's, which basically everyone have known for a decade as bullshit. Having to agree to draconian terms to use something you own is ridiculous. If EULA's become enforceable there's nothing preventing a toaster maker from banning you from toasting bagels in your machine and countless other absurd usurious machinations. EULA 'shrinkwrap' license agreements are a…

I'm confused - does the EULA prevent use within one's own data center? Or is it just that a cloud computing service such as AWS or Azure cannot offer them? Because if it's the latter then the article doesn't hold nearly as much weight imo.

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

#56

Post by acd »

forgotpassagan wrote: post #5

In good news, this may finally force a court case around EULA's, which basically everyone have known for a decade as bullshit. Having to agree to draconian terms to use something you own is ridiculous. If EULA's become enforceable there's nothing preventing a toaster maker from banning you from toasting bagels in your machine and countless other absurd usurious machinations. EULA 'shrinkwrap' license agreements are a…

The thing with EULAs is that you do not own the product. You are licensed to use the product under the company’s draconian terms. Agree that there needs to be new consumer laws protecting consumers.

A contract used in the old times 1800s to be one to two pages of simple English that both parties negotiated the agreed terms on. Now EULas almost requires a degree in law to understand yet you abide to the terms under civil liability. Further more Eula’s are so long most people blind sign without reading and understanding the terms.

There is also questions whether terms in Eula’s are legal such as limiting free speech about the product. In many countries free speech is a right regulated as basic first amendment laws.

Can you limit free speech?

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

#57

Post by QAPereo »

solomatov wrote: post #47
f1notformula1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You get that pretty much everywhere that used to be British common law iirc, and it’s why contracts frequently define seemingly minor and silly terms, ones which are obvious such as “the undersigned“ and all manner of the seemingly banal. In essence the contract is first and foremost agreeing on the same language, to express a commitment which ideally all parties are fully cognizant of.

Edit: spelling

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

#58

Post by garmaine »

acd wrote: post #56
forgotpassagan wrote: post #5

In good news, this may finally force a court case around EULA's, which basically everyone have known for a decade as bullshit. Having to agree to draconian terms to use something you own is ridiculous. If EULA's become enforceable there's nothing preventing a toaster maker from banning you from toasting bagels in your machine and countless other absurd usurious machinations. EULA 'shrinkwrap' license agreements are a…

The thing with EULAs is that you do not own the product. You are licensed to use the product under the company’s draconian terms. Agree that there needs to be new consumer laws protecting consumers. A contract used in the old times 1800s to be one to two pages of simple English that both parties negotiated the agreed terms on. Now EULas almost requires a degree in law to understand yet you abide to the terms under ci…

That’s an argument for software licenses. My NVIDIA GPU on the other hand is hardware I own.

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

#59

Post by Rapzid »

wmf wrote: post #9
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 fact that "humps" exist implies that quite a few people are putting GeForces in servers and not talking about it. https://www.servethehome.com/avert-your-eyes-from-the-server...

Plenty of people. You can find tons of articles on GeForce 1080 Ti based learning box builds.

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

#60

Post by sabalaba »

This should be a rallying cry to the developer community to stop using software with restrictive licenses.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw

“Join us now and share the software!”

In all seriousness anybody using CUDA should immediately start checking out and contributing to ROCm, AMD’s Open Source Compute Platform:

https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm

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