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Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software to run on other chips

tomshardware.com

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Re: Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software to run on other chips

#111

Post by dotnet00 »

Aloisius wrote: post #110
dotnet00 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still doesn't seem accurate. I have CUDA 11.6 on my machine from Dec 2021, just checked the EULA included there, and it did have the mentioned clause there too.

It was in fact added to the EULA.txt file in 11.6. The header says it was updated October 8, 2021. % diff EULA.txt-11.5 EULA.txt-11.6 |grep -2 trans > 8. You may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble > any portion of the output generated using SDK elements for > the purpose of translating such output artifacts to target > a non-NVIDIA platform. That said, I believe 11.6 was released in January, 2022.

>That said, I believe 11.6 was released in January, 2022.

Ah that's right, the Dec 2021 timestamp was for 'last modified', but 'created' is Jan 2022.

Re: Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software to run on other chips

#112

Post by samus »

salawat wrote: post #100
samus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clean-room reverse engineering is specifically not forbidden, and has been successfully done in the past to develop the Nouveau driver. Disassembling Nvidia's binaries is plausibly forbidden, but it would be very surprising if they could extend that ban on binaries produced by their compiler. However, the trademark could be used to attack statements about the emulation layer. I see parallels to Google vs. Oracle

Note Nouveau is dead in the water due to DMCA 1201, plus Nvidia's use of secrutful FALCON units to cryptographically verify firmware signatures.

Recently, development has picked up again though. They basically surrendered and now use the proprietary blob. The Mesa driver supports Vulkan 1.3 and Zink will be used for OpenGL going forward. Now on to more performance optimization and maybe bringing up some of the other proprietary IP blocks...

Re: Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software to run on other chips

#113

Post by salawat »

samus wrote: post #112
salawat wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note Nouveau is dead in the water due to DMCA 1201, plus Nvidia's use of secrutful FALCON units to cryptographically verify firmware signatures.

Recently, development has picked up again though. They basically surrendered and now use the proprietary blob. The Mesa driver supports Vulkan 1.3 and Zink will be used for OpenGL going forward. Now on to more performance optimization and maybe bringing up some of the other proprietary IP blocks...

Realistically, all that means is that Nouveau is giving in to the death of rights of First Sale, which is a fight I'm not willing to give up on fighting for yet even if every deep pocketed interest and it's sister seems to be swinging that way.

Re: Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software to run on other chips

#114

Post by salawat »

Zetobal wrote: post #105
salawat wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like " I refuse to be held hostage by your delusional business model" more like. I bought two GTX 970's, and a GTX 1030. Then I did the research on how they actually worked and the nefarious things the company got up to in order to spoliate open source drivers. The minute they switched to secritful Falcon units, is when any pretense of good faith was thrown out the door. They cheated me out of 3 graphics cards w…

[flagged]

Oh yes. Because Nvidia so proudly and eloquently states "I engage in anti-competitive practices." Yes, it is my fault, but dare I say, how many 20 somethings do you know that come chock full of sufficient life experience to identify hostile/predatory business models? I don't see many at all. And for that matter, in order to get the information I now have, I had to dive through half-a-dozen search engines in order to find architecture information that was NDA'd, but nevertheless left open to be indexed by someone.

So yeah. There's uninformed, but goddamn if that doesn't seem to be Nvidia's modus operandi.

Re: Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software to run on other chips

#115

Post by jijijijij »

brookst wrote: post #97
ActionHank wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they just put up their hand and said they also want to give the EU money?

At this point with the level of demand they have, it might be easier and cheaper to just not do business in the EU.

Funny how nobody does that, eh?! Could be because the EU is the second biggest consumer market on this planet. But of course, they could totally focus on China, now third and rising, instead. Maybe they can even ask the CCP to help them with their IP claims and stuff.

Re: Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software to run on other chips

#116

Post by TeMPOraL »

whatshisface wrote: post #89
dotnet00 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decade ago, CUDA was still offering a more usable platform than the competition. The problem could only have been averted if AMD had properly committed to investing in their platform at least decade ago, just as NVIDIA has been doing for almost 2 decades now.

A decade ago, CUDA was better, but I don't think the industry had crossed the threshold of being stuck on it. AMD still had the option of investing to catch up, and there would have been the possibility of an industry consortium. Now, with the whole ML stack having been optimized over ten years of rapid development for a single proprietary standard, and especially with the deliberate obstructionism exemplified by the…

A decade ago we still called it GPGPU and it was a somewhat niche stuff used for specialized applications. There wasn't enough interest in the field to warrant that heavy investment. Fast-forward ten years, and we're in rapid inflation phase (the cosmological kind, not the financial kind) - whatever choices were there at the start got baked in, and are sinks for all the free money that's coming in and demanding fast results. AMD could've solved this 10 years ago if they invested in it, but they didn't have future knowledge about ML on GPUs being the next big thing.

Re: Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software to run on other chips

#118

Post by charcircuit »

salawat wrote: post #98
Zetobal wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

More like " I refuse to be held hostage by your delusional business model" more like. I bought two GTX 970's, and a GTX 1030. Then I did the research on how they actually worked and the nefarious things the company got up to in order to spoliate open source drivers. The minute they switched to secritful Falcon units, is when any pretense of good faith was thrown out the door. They cheated me out of 3 graphics cards w…

>nefarious things the company got up to in order to spoliate open source projects

Nvidia hasn't attempted to destroy open source drivers. In fact they work with open source drivers such as nouveau and mesa.

>They cheated me out of 3 graphics cards worth of functionality.

The cards work fine with Nvidia's drivers. You are only cheating yourself if you refuse to use them for some reason.

Re: Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software to run on other chips

#119

Post by colechristensen »

shadowgovt wrote: post #80
colechristensen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is NVIDIA charging for what they're spending money on and making CUDA as big a cost as the hardware. I don't know what I agree with but hardware-supported-software being free is a good thing, your competitors being able to use it for free is a bad thing. I wonder legally if it would work to instead have licensing that charged a reasonable fee to run CUDA on non-NVIDIA hardware. Just don't enforce it f…

> hardware-supported-software being free is a good thing, your competitors being able to use it for free is a bad thing. ... bad thing for whom? Especially having been in the unenviable position of needing to debug implementation errors in shader compilation, I'd argue that for the end user, it's much better if the software is not only usable for free, but open-source. To the extent that the ownership the hardware ve…

"All their competition has to do" is quite the assumption, when in fact CUDA and drivers is a very significant portion of the work NVIDIA does. NVIDIA is winning because of their software work, this is where they've added the most value to their product. NVIDIA can compete on hardware, but the reason AI/ML is where it is today rests largely on the investment in software NVIDIA has done in the last 20 years enabling these kinds of things. Everyone could be using the open source alternatives, but they're not because the OSS isn't as good because... nobody paid for it.

I'm all for open source, you should be able to run whatever you want on your NVIDIA card (and you can, no walled gardens there), but it doesn't go as far as insisting that if someone wrote software it should be free.

Re: Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software to run on other chips

#120

Post by laweijfmvo »

samus wrote: post #43
laweijfmvo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making lawyers rich to waste time is how super rich companies stifle competition...

That works against small fishes, but it would be a different story if AMD or Intel take part.

Then it wastes double the time, and makes double the lawyers rich :D
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