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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#231

Post by timidger »

selectodude wrote: post #203
endgame wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html You mean this Weyland "support"?

"October 26, 2017" I'm not coming out and saying it's gotten significantly better, but that is a three year old article and Nvidia-wayland does work on KDE and Gnome.

That's because they implemented egl streams, nothing has changed majorly since then. There's been a lot of talk, but no action towards unification. The ball is entirely in Nvidia's court and they continue to work together on this.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#232

Post by dis-sys »

QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #124
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…

NVIDIA’s hardware works on x86, PowerPC, and ARM platforms. Many of their AI libraries/tools are in fact open source. They stand to be a force that could propel ARM’s strength in data center and desktop computing. For some reason you’re okay with the current x86 duopoly held by AMD and Intel, both who have their own destiny over CPUs and GPUs. The HN crowd is incredibly biased against certain companies. Why not look…

> Why not look at some of the potential bright sides to this for a more nuanced and balanced opinion?

because as a NVIDIA user of the last 20 years, I never saw such bright side when it comes to open source.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#233

Post by magic_quotes »

phire wrote: post #191
tony wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 als…

Native Linux stuff is not at all native for FreeBSD. If Nvidia suddenly decides to open their driver (to merge it into Linux), FreeBSD and Solaris support will be the first thing thrown out.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#234

Post by scarface74 »

hu3 wrote: post #170
RL_Quine wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company who was part of the creation of ARM and has a perpetual license to its IP? Tell me how.

Even perpetual license to future IP?

Why would Apple need future ARM IP? They have more than enough in house talent to take their license in any direction they wish.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#235

Post by 01100011 »

paxys wrote: post #210
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…

You are just starting to feel that now?

I know, right? It's finally hitting me. I am realizing how much of an asshole I've become thanks to the validation of a handful of strangers on the internet. I have caught myself commenting on things I have only cursory knowledge of and being justified by the likes of strangers. I actually believed that the online communities I participated in actually represented the world at large.

I'm not quite ready to end my participation in HN, but I'm close. I am looking back on the last 10 years of participation in forums like this and wondering what the hell good it did. I am also suddenly very worried for what sites like Reddit are doing to kids. That process of validation is going to produce some very anti-social, misguided adults.

I would rather participate in an argument map style discussion, or, frankly, just read the thoughts of 'experts'.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#236

Post by arp242 »

QuixoticQuibit wrote: post #124
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…

NVIDIA’s hardware works on x86, PowerPC, and ARM platforms. Many of their AI libraries/tools are in fact open source. They stand to be a force that could propel ARM’s strength in data center and desktop computing. For some reason you’re okay with the current x86 duopoly held by AMD and Intel, both who have their own destiny over CPUs and GPUs. The HN crowd is incredibly biased against certain companies. Why not look…

I don't really have an opinion on nVidia, as I haven't dealt with any of their products for over a decade; my own problem with this is somewhat more abstract: I'm not a big fan of this constant drive towards merging all these tech companies (or indeed, any company really). Perhaps there are some short-term advantages for the ARM platform, but on the long term it means a few small tech companies will have all the power, which doesn't strike me as a good thing.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#237

Post by systemvoltage »

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…

Totally. I see a future where people will have edge over others when they pay for information than relying on free sources (except Wikipedia due to its scale, but still, Wikipedia is not a replacement for a proper academic textbook).

FT provides insightful commentary from finance/business side of things and their subscription is expensive - rightfully so.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#238

Post by jefft255 »

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

« I spent most of the afternoon hacking away at some unsupported edge case on an unsupported platform which is inadequate for what I’m trying to do. It doesn’t work, which is clearly nvidia’s fault. »

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#239

Post by sillysaurusx »

shaklee3 wrote: post #212
sillysaurusx wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 G…

Well, there you go. For one TensorFlow is not a generic framework like cuda is, so you lose a whole bunch of the configurability you have with cuda. So, for example, even though there is an FFT raw function, there doesn't appear to be a way to do more complicated FFTs, such as an overlap-save. This is trivial to do on a GPU, and is built into the library. The raw functions it provides is not direct access to the hard…

For one TensorFlow is not a generic framework like cuda is, so you lose a whole bunch of the configurability you have with cuda

Why make generalizations like this? It's not true, and we've devolved back into the "nu uh" we originally started with.

This is trivial to do on a GPU, and is built into the library

Yes, I'm sure there are hardwired operations that are trivial to do on GPUs. That's not exactly a +1 in favor of generic programmability. There are also operations that are trivial to do on TPUs, such as CrossReplicaSum across a massive cluster of cores, or the various special-case Adam operations. This doesn't seem related to the claim that TPUs are less flexible.

The raw functions it provides is not direct access to the hardware and memory subsystem.

Not true. https://www.tensorflow.org/api_docs/python/tf/raw_ops/Inplac...

Jax is also going to be giving even lower-level access than TF, which may interest you.

You did not give an example of something GPUs can't do. all you said was that TPUs are faster for a specific function in your case.

Well yeah, I care about achieving goals in my specific case, as you do yours. And simply getting together a VM that can feed 500 examples/sec to a set of GPUs is a massive undertaking in and of itself. TPUs make it more or less "easy" in comparison. (I won't say effortless, since it does take some effort to get yourself into the TPU programming mindset.)

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#240

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

MattGaiser wrote: post #127
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #72

I’m not convinced this is a death sentence for ARM. I doubt nVidia spent $40b on a company with the intention of killing it’s golden goose business model. The contractual agreements might change, but ARM wasn’t exactly giving their IP away for free before this move.

It is less about them intentionally killing it and more about their culture and attitude killing it.

Does Nvidia have a habit of killing acquisitions? I'm only familiar with their graphics business, but as far as I can see the only culture going on there is excellence.
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