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Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

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Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#101

Post by kmeisthax »

Nitrolo wrote: post #57
bonzini wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they throttle workstation GPUs Not sure about this, but they definitely prevent the loading of drivers for GeForce cards if they detect a hypervisor (Quadro cards work). Nvidia claims that it's a bug, and that they're not fixing it only because GeForce cards are not sold to be run in virtual machines. At the very least it's a dubious claim since for a short time there was an arms race as workarounds were figured ou…

Not doubting that this is the case, but what's the reason for nVidia wanting to restrict use in virtual machines?

"Fuck you, pay me". Nvidia explicitly forbids "datacenter usage" of their drivers outside of specific licensed-for-datacenter product stacks. (The only exception is for crypto mining, for some reason.) This isn't the only product segmentation in their lineup, either. CAD software optimizations are only available for Quadro cards and up, virtual GPUs are only available for GRID cards, etc. The same GPU they'll charge $600 to gamers for will often go for $3000 or more for businesses.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#104

Post by pabs3 »

leeoniya wrote: post #89
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not reverse engineering, but having to reverse engineer.

i should have clarified that i was asking why Mali is more terrible than Adreno, MediaTek, etc. AFAIK, all embedded GPU drivers have to be reverse engineered and none are open source. as you mentioned, it looks like Tegra might have some open-source contrib from the mfg.

The VC4 (RPi GPU) drivers were written by an open source contributor (Eric Anholt) who was employed by Broadcom to do that.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#105

Post by pjmlp »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #45
com2kid wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internally we supported SH4 through CE7! Source: I maintained the compiler test infra for it.

I salute you sir! What’s the current roadmap for CE? I saw there’s a new CE environment in Win10 IoT, but it feels like too-little-too-late to save the myriad of embedded enterprise CE systems.

There is a recent post about it.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things/mo...

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#106

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

chongli wrote: post #23
awalton wrote: post #8

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) Bu…

I think nVidia could run into some serious anti-trust issues if they tried to interfere with the ARM ecosystem. There's far too much at stake here. Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?

>I think nVidia could run into some serious anti-trust issues if they tried to interfere with the ARM ecosystem.

I seriously doubt it, Broadcom - Qualcomm sale was blocked because there were concerns that the former would inhibit the telecom technologies development of the latter, resulting in strategic disadvantage to U.S. But, in the case of supposed Nvidia-ARM sale I see the quite opposite i.e. huge strategic advantage to U.S. and so I feel the anti-trust might not be at least State initiated.

But, would other U.S. Big Tech who have invested heavily in the ARM ecosystem oppose this is what to be seen. But even there, I wonder whether their fear could be substantiated? What if Nvidia just signs a good agreement with them to alleviate their fears? After all Apple and Qualcomm were strangling each other throats, now see where they are now.

In the end, I think the deal would just go through and it's us who are worried about the future our Raspberry Pis among others things who would feel lost(and actually loose).

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#107

Post by pjmlp »

johnklos wrote: post #32
mud_dauber wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others": can you elaborate or mention an example? That aspect has escaped me thus far.

NVIDIA can compete based on the superior performance of their products, but that's not enough. They try to attempt lock-in by encouraging software writers to use CUDA and not use OpenCL. In many projects that support both, OpenCL and CUDA often give similar performance, and in some, OpenCL is faster than CUDA. So CUDA isn't about getting more performance - it's about excluding everything non-NVIDIA. I suspect that NV…

They don't need to do any lock-in when the choice is between plain old C with printf like debugging, and a set of programming languages able to target PTX, with out of the box support for C, C++, Fortran and several managed languages, and nice graphical debugging tools.

C++ support only came to OpenCL after it was clear to Khronos that it was time to move beyond C only vision of the world, yet almost no one bothered to implement OpenCL 2.x, which is why OpenCL 3.0 is basically OpenCL 1.2 to make all those OEM compliant, and SYCL is now moving into an backend agnostic C++ stack.

So the competition did not move a finger to make OpenCL eco-system beat CUDA tooling, Google did not cared one second to make OpenCL available on Android instead pushed for their own Renderscript C99 dialect, but it is easy to blame NVidia when competition isn't up to their stuff.

Just like Apple, after creating OpenCL and offering it to Khronos, moved away from their own creation after disputes on how OpenCL roadmap should be managed. Ironically, just like with CUDA, Metal Compute happens to be multiple language aware and having a modern API.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#108

Post by pmontra »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #106
chongli wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think nVidia could run into some serious anti-trust issues if they tried to interfere with the ARM ecosystem. There's far too much at stake here. Is there a phone on the planet that doesn't run ARM?

>I think nVidia could run into some serious anti-trust issues if they tried to interfere with the ARM ecosystem. I seriously doubt it, Broadcom - Qualcomm sale was blocked because there were concerns that the former would inhibit the telecom technologies development of the latter, resulting in strategic disadvantage to U.S. But, in the case of supposed Nvidia-ARM sale I see the quite opposite i.e. huge strategic adva…

Wouldn't the EU antitrust look into that too or is this going to be out of their jurisdiction after Brexit?

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#109

Post by Matthias247 »

com2kid wrote: post #41
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there’s some MIPS and SH-3/SH-4 smartphones from the early 2000s still around. I had an SH-3 PDA in 2001, but Microsoft dropped support for SH-3 and MIPS in Windows CE by the time “Windows Smartphone 2002” came out (my 2002 HTC Canary runs ARM, IIRC) so it’d have to be a non-CE platform. What did the Palm Handspring use?

Internally we supported SH4 through CE7! Source: I maintained the compiler test infra for it.

Not only internally. Infotainment Systems with the CE7 and SH4 combination had been built well beyond 2012. Only around that time Arm got traction.

At some point in time it got then renamed in embedded compact.

Source: worked in the automotive together with a couple of supplier which built those systems.

Re: Arm co-founder: Sale to Nvidia would be a disaster

#110

Post by pjmlp »

xvilka wrote: post #56
axaxs wrote: post #34

I for one would welcome this. Firstly, as mentioned, it gives people incentive to look into RiscV. That aside, for far too long QCOM has had a monopoly on the phone chip market. Patents aside, which increasingly became irrelevant due to the death of Sprint, their major advantage has always been in Adreno, which as far as I remember AMD basically did for them. Mali is terrible. If Nvidia could revamp ARM graphics at t…

It will be the end of Linux on ARM. They will choke platform with blobs until the inevitable death. NVIDIA and open-source is like matter and antimatter - they simply cannot coexist in the same place and time.

ARM is all about licensing and selling hardware IP, they will use Linux to the extent that it helps to sell their IP, just like most companies that actually pay for engineers to contribute some parts of their crown jewels to Linux, while leaving the rest for their own in-house distributions.

Also in case you haven't noticed, the IoT domain where ARM thrives is getting full of BSD/MIT POSIX clones, guess why.

ARM mbed, Zephyr, RTOS, NuttX, Azure RTOS ThreadX, ...

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