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

bbc.com

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

#221

Post by voltagex_ »

baybal2 wrote: post #169
panpanna wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIPS was pretty popular among early Shenzhen tablets. Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former...

> MIPS was pretty popular among early Shenzhen tablets. > Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former... MIPS SoCs simply fell too much behind. They kept presence in the STB, and router boxes for some time, but even there they lost due to overall "deadness" of the entire ecosystem: Want latest compiler work, and mainline GCC support? Go for ARM Want…

Ubiquiti will still sell you a shiny, expensive MIPS box, as will GL.inet.

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

#222

Post by ris »

shaklee3 wrote: post #84
foota wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CUDA is probably the biggest thing here, also I don't think they open source much.

This is increasingly becoming not true. See cutlass and the new release of cufftdx.

These are both things that are unlikely to ever be able to run on anything other than nvidia hardware. It's hardly a mark in their favour over abusive lock-in practices.

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

#223

Post by panpanna »

p0llard wrote: post #201
baybal2 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MIPS was pretty popular among early Shenzhen tablets. > Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former... MIPS SoCs simply fell too much behind. They kept presence in the STB, and router boxes for some time, but even there they lost due to overall "deadness" of the entire ecosystem: Want latest compiler work, and mainline GCC support? Go for ARM Want…

> Want to work with an IP vendor whose sales are not part time lawyers? Go for ARM Interested in this comment: were MIPS/Imagination known for being particularly litigious around licensing?

There are tons of stories about MIPS going after people for trivial designs.

http://probell.com/Lexra/index.html

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

#224

Post by jlokier »

baybal2 wrote: post #169
panpanna wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MIPS was pretty popular among early Shenzhen tablets. Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former...

> MIPS was pretty popular among early Shenzhen tablets. > Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former... MIPS SoCs simply fell too much behind. They kept presence in the STB, and router boxes for some time, but even there they lost due to overall "deadness" of the entire ecosystem: Want latest compiler work, and mainline GCC support? Go for ARM Want…

> Want to work with an IP vendor whose sales are not part time lawyers? Go for ARM

Er... not convinced about this one.

ARM has been quite lawyerish sometimes.

For a while, parts of QEMU could not be published, at ARM's request, because they implemented instructions ARM did not permit a software emulator to emulate.

At least one non-commercial design on opencores.org was removed at ARM's request.

By comparison, for a while MIPS ISA was completely open for anyone to implement, software or hardware. That's been retracted now, but it was nice while it lasted. ARM has never done that as far as I know.

Even before, I used devices based around MIPS without a licence a long time ago, so long as they avoided implementing one or two "special sauce" instructions that was fine. The instructions weren't necessary, just a neat, patented optimisation, and I have a GCC patch somewhere for building the target without those instructions.

So I don't know about today, but until recently I would have consistently regarded MIPS as much less lawyerish than ARM.

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

#225

Post by ris »

pabs3 wrote: post #104
leeoniya wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

After many many years of petition from the community to even release documentation on the VC4.

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

#226

Post by shaklee3 »

ris wrote: post #222
shaklee3 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is increasingly becoming not true. See cutlass and the new release of cufftdx.

These are both things that are unlikely to ever be able to run on anything other than nvidia hardware. It's hardly a mark in their favour over abusive lock-in practices.

Well, of course. They're written in cuda. Why would Nvidia try to write it in a language like opencl that even AMD is moving away from, and instead making fft/blas library calls? At least the source code is there if you wanted to port it.

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

#227

Post by baybal2 »

pantalaimon wrote: post #211
baybal2 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MIPS was pretty popular among early Shenzhen tablets. > Then they just disappeared. Either MIPS screwed up or ARM did something really smart. My money is on the former... MIPS SoCs simply fell too much behind. They kept presence in the STB, and router boxes for some time, but even there they lost due to overall "deadness" of the entire ecosystem: Want latest compiler work, and mainline GCC support? Go for ARM Want…

> Want latest compiler work, and mainline GCC support? Go for ARM > Want to not to have to support your own Linux fork? Go for ARM But that's also true for MIPS.

I have not seen any activity from MIPS on GCC for years.

Making a Linux port for a given MIPS based SoC is a known pain. They should've worked towards not requiring any hardcoded configuration for each SoC at all, like Linux on ARM does these days.

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

#228

Post by evancox100 »

panpanna wrote: post #164
9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was the apple gpu fiasco. Apple laptop GPUs were failing at an extraordinary rate in 2010-2011, and Apple were getting harangued in the media about it (which was justified). Apple eventually announced a program to cover replacement of the GPUs, but it was very delayed. I'm 100% convinced the delay was caused by Nvidia refusing to accept responsibility. When the program was released, in order to have the repair…

> I'm 100% convinced the delay was caused by Nvidia refusing to accept responsibility. To be fair, the issue was mainly caused by Apples form-over-function thermal design. To best of my knowledge, Nvidia GPUs works just fine in all other laptops.

100% not true, my Dell Latitude at the time also died. There were major class action lawsuits at the time and basically all the manufacturers had to accept liability and fix them.

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

#229

Post by [deleted] »

OJFord wrote: post #175
qubex wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m (half-)British and I consider “ could care less ” a hideous American corruption. Recently I successfully argued my case with an American friend, not coincidentally a physicist, by analogy to zero-point energy.

Yes so am I (person you're replying to) - fully - and also consider it both hideous and American. I wouldn't call it a corruption though, because I've never actually heard it in Britain; just American film and television, and even on HN.

[deleted]

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

#230

Post by craftinator »

throw0101a wrote: post #207
znpy wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given that they co-founded ARM ?????

> The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology.[17][18][19] The new company intended to further the development of the Acorn RISC Machine processor, which was originally used in the Acorn Archimedes and had been selected by Apple for its Newton project. […] The company was first lis…

Holy moly, how did I never know this? I've worked on ARM based systems for years and never run across this tidbit. Thanks for sharing!
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