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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#191

Post by phire »

tony wrote: post #168
gautamcgoel wrote: post #20

This is awful . Out of all the big tech companies, Nvidia is probably least friendly to open source and cross-platform comparability. It seems to me that their goal is to monopolize AI hardware over the next 20 years, the same way Intel effectively monopolized cloud hardware over the last 20. Expect to see less choice in the chip market and more and more propietary software frameworks like CUDA. A sad day for CS and…

Surprisingly - they have a working driver for FreeBSD. Never had an issue with it - and the performance is fantastic. As far back as early 2000's I remember installing proprietary nvidia drivers on Linux and playing UT2004. Maybe Nintendo/Sony uses Nvidia cards on their developer machines? I imagine FreeBSD drivers aren't simply altruism on their part. On the other hand, stagnation on other fronts: - Nouveau (tried r…

Nvidia's "Blob" approach does have an advantage when it comes to supporting random OSes.

It's less of a driver and more of an operating system. Basically self-contained with all the support libraries it needs. Super easy to port to a new operating system and any driver improvement work on all OSes.

But the approach also has many downsides. It's big. It ignores all the native stuff (like linux's GEM interface).

It also has random issues with locking up the entire system. Like if you are debugging a process with the linux drivers, a breakpoint or a pause in the wrong place can deadlock the system.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#192

Post by RantyDave »

dragontamer wrote: post #159
paulmd wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consider one of NVidia's rivals: AMD, who uses an ARM chip in their EPYC line of chips as a security co-processor. Does anyone expect NVidia to "play fair" with such a rival? Yes, absolutely. NVIDIA's not going to burn the ARM ecosystem to the ground. They just paid $40 billion for it. And they only had $11b of cash on hand, they really overpaid for it (because SoftBank desperately needed a big win to cover for the…

When Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems for $7.4 Billion, did you expect Oracle to burn Solaris to the ground, and turn their back on MySQL's open source philosophy? Then sue Google for billions of dollars over the Java / Android thing? Or more recently, when Facebook bought Oculus for $2 Billion, did you expect Facebook to betraying the customer's trust and start pushing Facebook logins? The Oculus / Facebook login t…

I'm not at all surprised they killed Solaris. Given that Oracle was pretty much the only software that ran on Solaris (or that there might be a good reason to run on Solaris), maybe it was just a big support headache. As for MySQL? Not surprised at all. They pretty much just bought a brand name, maybe just to spite red hat.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#193

Post by rtpg »

dragontamer wrote: post #159
paulmd wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consider one of NVidia's rivals: AMD, who uses an ARM chip in their EPYC line of chips as a security co-processor. Does anyone expect NVidia to "play fair" with such a rival? Yes, absolutely. NVIDIA's not going to burn the ARM ecosystem to the ground. They just paid $40 billion for it. And they only had $11b of cash on hand, they really overpaid for it (because SoftBank desperately needed a big win to cover for the…

When Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems for $7.4 Billion, did you expect Oracle to burn Solaris to the ground, and turn their back on MySQL's open source philosophy? Then sue Google for billions of dollars over the Java / Android thing? Or more recently, when Facebook bought Oculus for $2 Billion, did you expect Facebook to betraying the customer's trust and start pushing Facebook logins? The Oculus / Facebook login t…

> Or more recently, when Facebook bought Oculus for $2 Billion, did you expect Facebook to betraying the customer's trust and start pushing Facebook logins?

yes? I mean that felt eminently possible from the get-go.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#194

Post by TomVDB »

gumby wrote: post #125
acomjean wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple and Nvidia don't seem to see eye to eye. Nvidia doesn't support macs (CUDA support was pulled a year or two ago) and apples don't include Nvidia cards. This could change.

This is because Nvidia screwed apple (from Apple’s POV) years ago with some bad GPUs to the point where Apple flat out refuses to source Nvidia parts. I don’t know the internal details of course just the public ones so can’t say if Apple is being petty or if Nvidia burned the bridge while the problem was unfolding. Given that the CEO was the supply chain guy at the time I suspect the latter, as I’d imagine he’d be mo…

> ... to the point where Apple flat out refuses to source Nvidia parts.

I've seen this argument made before.

It would be a valid point if Apple stopped using Nvidia GPUs in 2008 (they did), and then never used them again. And yet, 4 years later, they used Nvidia GPUs on the 2012 MacBook Retina 15" on which I'm typing this.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#195

Post by dheera »

tony wrote: post #168
gautamcgoel wrote: post #20

This is awful . Out of all the big tech companies, Nvidia is probably least friendly to open source and cross-platform comparability. It seems to me that their goal is to monopolize AI hardware over the next 20 years, the same way Intel effectively monopolized cloud hardware over the last 20. Expect to see less choice in the chip market and more and more propietary software frameworks like CUDA. A sad day for CS and…

Surprisingly - they have a working driver for FreeBSD. Never had an issue with it - and the performance is fantastic. As far back as early 2000's I remember installing proprietary nvidia drivers on Linux and playing UT2004. Maybe Nintendo/Sony uses Nvidia cards on their developer machines? I imagine FreeBSD drivers aren't simply altruism on their part. On the other hand, stagnation on other fronts: - Nouveau (tried r…

The proprietary driver also doesn't support fractional scaling on 20.04 and I've been waiting ages for that.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#196

Post by sillysaurusx »

shaklee3 wrote: post #166
sillysaurusx wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where all of this misinformation is coming from or why, but, as someone who has spent the last year programming TPUs to do all kinds of things that a GPU can't do, this isn't true. Are we going to simply say "Nu uh" at each other, or do you want to throw down some specific examples so I can show you how mistaken they are?

Please show me the API where I can write a generic function on a TPU. I'm talking about writing something like a custom reduction or a peak search, not offloading a tensor flow model. I'll make it easier for you, directly from Google's website: TPUs Cloud TPUs are optimized for specific workloads. In some situations, you might want to use GPUs or CPUs on Compute Engine instances to run your machine learning workloads…

Sure, here you go: https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/raw_ops

In my experience, well over 80% of these operations are implemented on TPU CPUs, and at least 60% are implemented on TPU cores.

Again, if you give a specific example, I can simply write a program demonstrating that it works. What kind of custom reduction do you want? What's a peak search?

As for workloads that GPUs can't do, we regularly train GANs at 500+ examples/sec across a total dataset size of >3M photos. Rather hard to do that with GPUs.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#197

Post by fomine3 »

nolaspring wrote: post #173
QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at their AI/CUDA documentation and associated githubs. Many of their tools and libraries are open source. Tell me, what other AI platform works with x86 and PowerPC and ARM? Currently NVIDIA’s GPUs do.

I spent most of this afternoon tying to get cuda in docker to work on my Mac for a machine learning use case. It doesn’t. Because nvidia

Because Apple. NVidia was tried to support Macs but Apple stops support.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#198

Post by dylan604 »

therealmarv wrote: post #55
rvz wrote: post #34

What a death sentence for ARM right there and the start of a starvation in a new microprocessor winter. I guess we now have to wait for RISC-V to catch up. Aside from that, ARM was one of the only actual tech companies the UK could talk about on the so-called "world stage", that has survived more than 2 decades. But instead, they continue to sell themselves and their businesses to the US instead of vice versa. In 201…

Have you read the press release at all? It's too early to judge this now. ARM will stay in Cambridge and Nvidia wants to invest in this place.

And when Facebook bought Oculus, they said no FB login would be required to use Oculus. FoxConn was supposed to ramp up production in the US according to a press release. That was then, now time has passed. bigCorp hopes your short term memory forgets the woohooism from a foregone press release.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#199

Post by diydsp »

01100011 wrote: post #153

Can we,for once, hear the opinions of people in the chip industry and not the same tired posts from software folks? NVIDIA Bad! Ok, we get it. Do you have anything more insightful than that? I'm starting to feel like social media based on upvotes is a utter waste of time. Echo chambers and groupthink. People commenting on things they barely know anything about and getting validation from others who don't know anythin…

as an embedded dev, the last 2-4 years of STM (major ARM provider) have seen a large degree of integration of specialized hardware into 32-bit microcontrollers. e.g. radios, motor control, AI, 64-bit FPUs, graphics, low-power, etc.

I expect more of the same. The only way it could go wrong is if they lose customer focus. Microcontrollers are a competitive, near-commodity market, so companies have to provide valuable features.

I don't really know Nvidia well - I only buy their stock! - but they seem to be keeping their customers happy by paying attention to what they need. Perhaps their fabrication will be a boon to micros, as they're usually a few gens behind laptop/server processors.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#200

Post by llukas »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #119
option wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no they are not. Go read recent MLPerf results more carefully and not Google’s blogpost. NVIDIA won 8/8 benchmarks for publicly available SW/HW combo. Also 8/8 on per chip performance. Google did show better results with some “research” system which is not available to anyone other then them yet.

This is a weirdly aggressive reply. I don't "read Google's blogpost," I use TPUs daily. As for MLPerf benchmarks, you can see for yourself here: https://mlperf.org/training-results-0-6 TPUs are far ahead of competitors. All of these training results are openly available, and you can run them yourself. (I did.) For MLPerf 0.7, it's true that Google's software isn't available to the public yet. That's because they're i…

You are basing your opinion on last year MLPerf and some stuff that may or may not be available in the future. MLPerf 0.7 "available" category has been ghosted by google.

Pointing this out is not aggressive.

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