What’s the tl/dr on this?
Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage
141–150 of 155 posts
Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are 100% wrong. When that’s the concern, companies add warning labels or warranty limitations. Whether the GeForce cards are less reliable in that environment or not, that is not why the EULA was changed in this way.
I don't think you read my comment. I said that they're likely motivated by greed but there _exists_ a legitimate reason too. I didn't say that _is_ their reason, just that it exists.
If your assessment of GeForce reliability is correct, then there's no need for the clause in the EULA at all: people will try to use them in a datacenter, they will fail, and people will use the DC-oriented cards instead.
But that's not the case. Many people are finding they can use GeForce cards in a datacenter just fine, and it's cheaper than buying the DC-oriented cards. This is a money grab, pure and simple.
Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are 100% wrong. When that’s the concern, companies add warning labels or warranty limitations. Whether the GeForce cards are less reliable in that environment or not, that is not why the EULA was changed in this way.
I don't think you read my comment. I said that they're likely motivated by greed but there _exists_ a legitimate reason too. I didn't say that _is_ their reason, just that it exists.
If your assessment of GeForce reliability is correct, then there's no need for the clause in the EULA at all: people will try to use them in a datacenter, they will fail, and people will use the DC-oriented cards instead.
But that's not the case. Many people are finding they can use GeForce cards in a datacenter just fine, and it's cheaper than buying the DC-oriented cards. This is a money grab, pure and simple.
Not to mention that the EULA has a carve-out that says blockchain processing is permitted. So nvidia is even acknowledging that there's no hardware reliability issue.
Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage
#144Realistically, 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?
In the case of Amazon, who is responsible? Amazon might provide the hardware to their customer via an EC2 instance, but it's the end customer who downloads, installs, and uses the driver. The EULA restriction is on using the driver, not the hardware.
Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage
#145Curious coincidence... I was thinking of something similar earlier today. What is physical object had EULA licenses like, software ? Something more-or-less serious, like "you are not allowed to use this knife to eat meat", or "you are not allowed to use this spoon to eat jelly" or even "it is forbidden to publish a benchmark of this car" (related to an article that passed here on hn like a week ago). Would such EULA…
Physical objects are sold. Software (GPU drivers) is subject of copyright law — it's licensed.
Many (most?) new high-end consumer products run on software now. Your car, your fridge, your washing machine, your thermostat, etc. You do own the product, but they could make you "activate" the software license using the web, with an included EULA to click through. I suspect we will see some abuse of this in the future.
Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
TensorFlow depends exclusively (st time of writing) on CUDA for GPU acceleration. Leaning on them to support OpenCL fully would unlock the world of AMD GPUs that are move affordable and don’t have the same crazy EULA. I regret having bought GeForce cards for machine learning now...
TensorFlow also supports Intel Xeon Phi as an alternative https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/tensorflow-optimiz...
afaik Xeon phi doesn't come close to the performance per buck of gpus in deep learning
Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, however this depends heavily on jurisdiction. E.g. in Germany [0], license agreements presented after purchase are completely void anyway (although defining the moment of purchase for non-physical goods is tricky - not so for a graphics card though). So in Japan, maybe? [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endbenutzer-Lizenzvertrag
Well, Geforce GPUs are advertised more heavily for graphics than computing. If I were nVidia I'd try to argue that CUDA and other GPU computing libraries are separate products not purchased with this line of GPUs.
If you don't pay for them and need a product is it really a purchase?
Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage
#148Problem solved. Just run these GPUs as part of a decentralized P2P application (aka Blockchain). See http://intuitionfabric.com Let the masses contribute their GPU power to enable Deep Learning training and inference.
Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage
#149This 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…
While I agree it's likely motivated by greed, there is a legitimate reason too: GeForce cards simply aren't made to be run 24/7 in high density server environments. Put 200 of them in a rack and have them running inference or training 24/7 and I suspect you'll see them drop like flies. Tesla cards are explicitly designed for endurance.
Do you imply that GeForce cards have DC failure scenarios for specific computations only? The clause "... but it is ok to put them in DCs if you wanna mine some coins" goes against your argument.
Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They have just released the new Titan V, which has Tensor Cores I believe. That would indicate that they do want to include them in non workstation/dedicated ML cards, no?
The Titan V is a compute card, the same way the Titan XP and Titan Xs were. Differing factors between them and the xx80[Ti] of the corresponding generation were memory bandwidth and capacity - gaming performance was nearly identical to the geforce. Titans are entry-level compute.