Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

China: Nvidia Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over Linux Drivers and NRE's

brightsideofnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 61 posts

Re: China: Nvidia Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over Linux Drivers and NRE's

#51

Post by ginko »

mchatfie wrote: post #35

IMHO it's a good move by NVIDIA. The main differentiating factor between NVIDIA and AMD are the drivers. Release the driver source on any platform and NVIDIA loose their competitive edge. They are leaps and bounds better when it comes to OpenGL support. I can't comment from a DirectX perspective, but they always seem to be pushing the boundaries where AMD play catch up. This would be worth hundreds of millions so a 1…

This makes is even more mind boggling that AMD isn't opensourcing their own driver.

I'm sure a lot of the current driver problems could be fixed quite fast.

Re: China: Nvidia Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over Linux Drivers and NRE's

#52

Post by vidarh »

xlevus wrote: post #23
lucian1900 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many experts have shown that hardware specs which are sufficient for writing drivers are entirely useless for making hardware, to someone already versed in the field.

I read/heard/imagined(?) that the reason GPU vendors weren't willing to hand over their source was due to a proportion of their performance being software based. Which then a competitor could also implement.

But these code bases aren't nearly large enough for it to be a problem for a reasonably sized team armed with decent tools to disassemble and analyze them if the goal is to figure out the techniques used. It might be their reason, but if so it's a damn stupid reason.

Re: China: Nvidia Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over Linux Drivers and NRE's

#53

Post by aidenn0 »

Probably a good business move on nVidia's part; doing a lot of extra work for free, for a single sale in the hopes that it leads to a better relationship is typically not profitable.

Furthermore if China wasn't willing to spend $10s of millions more on a $300 million project, one has to wonder how important it was to them.

Re: China: Nvidia Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over Linux Drivers and NRE's

#54

Post by w1ntermute »

gaius wrote: post #43
w1ntermute wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities are given access to Windows source? I'd never heard of this before. Do they give access to all accredited universities, or is there some other kind of restriction?

See http://www.microsoft.com/education/facultyconnection/article...

> Use of the Windows Research Kernel requires academic affiliation with an accredited institution of higher education and direct involvement in teaching and/or research, such as being academic faculty members, system or lab administrators or instructors, students enrolled in relevant undergraduate or graduate programs, or academic researchers working on faculty sponsored projects.

As I thought.

Re: China: Nvidia Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over Linux Drivers and NRE's

#55

Post by swang »

mc32 wrote: post #50
drucken wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author clearly means Nvidia losing face with respect to China. This concept of "losing face" may seem like just a small word or minor loss of reputation to Westerners, but in a sense is more important in China (and to varying extent all over the Far East) than even money. If the story is true, and the depth of detail leads me to believe it is very likely, then the reputational damage to Nvidia would be high and,…

Also, the CEO is from Taiwan, so there could be some actual politics involved, seeing as CN regards TW as their "renegade" province.

That has nothing to do with it. Why would China even meet with Nvidia if their CEO being Taiwanese was an issue? There are tons of Taiwanese companies manufacturing in China and China has interests in Taiwan as well.

Assuming that this story is true (since it's based off "Rumors out of Beijing").

Re: China: Nvidia Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over Linux Drivers and NRE's

#56

Post by beagle3 »

megablast wrote: post #16
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #6

China is investing in Linux for one simple reason - they can have someone read the source code. A (low-level?) war is going on right now between US and China - and the battlefield are the hardware and software that runs the world. Can't read the code - then we don't trust that you aren't spying on us. Unfortunately I doubt they will extend the same rights to their citizens. On the Nvidia side, this is either the dumb…

Governments and Universities can already get access to Windows source. I think the difference is that China can write the source for Linux.

When I was in University (some 16 years ago), that was already the case. However, you could only browse the source - some essential pieces were missing that made it impossible to build a working system from that code.

Thus, you still have to trust that code you view is the code you run -- which is almost as bad as trusting documentation.

> I think the difference is that China can write the source for Linux.

I think the key here is that they are able to verify that the code they review is the code the run, by building the system.

And, I'm aware of "reflections on trusting trust", but I'm sure that they have a clean-room bootstrapped C compiler capable enough of bootstrapping tcc or gcc and thus the linux kernel.

Re: China: Nvidia Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over Linux Drivers and NRE's

#57

Post by drzaiusapelord »

vidarh wrote: post #5

As much as I want this to be true, I don't see anything in terms of sources, I've never heard of this site before, and the style of writing doesn't exactly make it seem very credible. I haven't tried very hard, but didn't immediately find any other sites with this news that weren't simply linking to or regurgitating this article. Losing or winning a contract this size is something you'd expect a lot of well known new…

The chinese are heavily invested in some kind of technology independence. The chip mentioned in this piece is most likely the nationalized homebrew CPU the Godson/Dragon/Loongson:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson

I guess they've gotten to the point where they want to push this CPU onto their school children with their Red Flag Linux distro.

I suspect there's more to the story other than "herp derp nvidia is stupidz!!" Open sourcing their drivers may open them to liablity or patent issues and/or give AMD a nice look into the nvidia internals. For all the grief AMD gets at least they opened their specs and allowed a community driver. The problem is that the OSS advocates want their cake and to eat it too. They don't want to develop all the hard 3D stuff, potentially get in patent issues, empower the competition, etc but expect NVIDIA to do this for them.

3D is a patent minefield. All the more reason to encourage patent reform.

Re: China: Nvidia Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over Linux Drivers and NRE's

#58

Post by mc32 »

swang wrote: post #55
mc32 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the CEO is from Taiwan, so there could be some actual politics involved, seeing as CN regards TW as their "renegade" province.

That has nothing to do with it. Why would China even meet with Nvidia if their CEO being Taiwanese was an issue? There are tons of Taiwanese companies manufacturing in China and China has interests in Taiwan as well. Assuming that this story is true (since it's based off "Rumors out of Beijing").

I'm just speculating. I'm not making a stament of fact. However, it's not out of the question that CN cares about the politics of the people who deal with CN.

Re: China: Nvidia Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over Linux Drivers and NRE's

#59

Post by [deleted] »

mchatfie wrote: post #35

IMHO it's a good move by NVIDIA. The main differentiating factor between NVIDIA and AMD are the drivers. Release the driver source on any platform and NVIDIA loose their competitive edge. They are leaps and bounds better when it comes to OpenGL support. I can't comment from a DirectX perspective, but they always seem to be pushing the boundaries where AMD play catch up. This would be worth hundreds of millions so a 1…

[deleted]

Re: China: Nvidia Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over Linux Drivers and NRE's

#60

Post by boralben »

dewiz wrote: post #20
vlasta2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, there is one thing about the title of this story that I do not understand. Why would a failed negotiation imply that "nvidia is losing face"?

as far as I can understand the convoluted article, the losing face part refers to Linus' outing

My interpretation is that Nvidia caused the Chinese to lose face, and this what will doom them to lose future contracts. I've been living here in China for 6 months now, and the social aspects of business, like face, are really nuanced, but so so important. I don't really understand them yet.
Post reply on HN