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Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

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Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#251

Post by arp242 »

paulmd wrote: post #186
mixmastamyk wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus famously gave them the middle-finger.

"linus went on a hyperbolic rant" isn't sufficient evidence for anything. linus is a hyperbolic jerk (as he admitted himself for a few months before resuming his hyperbolic ways) who is increasingly out of touch with anything outside the direct sphere of his projects. Like his misguided and completely unnecessary rants about ZFS or AVX. if there are technical merits to discuss you can post those instead of just appea…

He just responded to a complaint that nVidia hardware wasn't working with "nVidia is the worst company we've dealt with". I don't think that's "out of touch", it's pretty much the kind of stuff his job description entails. If you don't like his style, fair enough, but if the leader of a project says "company X is the worst company we deal with" then that doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#252

Post by Shared404 »

dheera wrote: post #241
Shared404 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't looked at the rest of your posts, but if this gets flagged, it's probably from this: [Edit: I disagree with my past self of having put this comment here. This is something that if one feels that they notice, they should probably comment on. Leaving it here for clarity's sake] > The HN algorithm basically encourages an echo chamber of people who gang up and downvote/flag others who don't agree with the gang op…

I think it depends on how you criticize them. I've criticized: - The idea that we can trust Apple with privacy, when their OS isn't open source - The idea that the Apple Store is doing good things in the disguise of privacy when they actually play corporate favoritism and unfairly monopolize the app market - The idea that a PIN has enough entropy to be a good measure of security - Right to repair, soldered-to-motherb…

> I've been downvoted to hell for speaking the above.

Fair enough. I don't think I've ever mentioned Apple by name, just participated in threads about them and commented on how I disagree about how they do some things.

I also went and reread some of my comments, and realized I haven't criticized Apple as much here as I'd originally thought. Apparently I mostly stick to that in meatspace.

> There are a bunch of brainwashed Apple worshippers lurking around here who don't accept any criticism of the holy.

As there are everywhere unfortunately. I haven't run into many here personally, but have no difficulty believing they are here.

> Also, I don't think criticizing HN's algorithm or design should warrant being flagged or downvoted, either. Downvoting should be reserved for trolling, not intelligent protest. I'm also of the opinion that downvotes shouldn't be used for well-written disagreement, as that creates an echo chamber and suppresses non-majority opinions.

I agree here as well. I was more trying to point out the combative tone then the content of the text. There was also some content that could be interpreted as accusations of shilling, which is technically against the guidelines.

To be clear -- I don't think your comment was accusing people of shilling, just that I can see how people could interpret it that way.

Edit: The first quote I took from your comment really shouldn't have been there. Sorry about that. I still think if you get flagged it's because of the "(Psst..." part though. That one does come off as a bit aggressive.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#253

Post by loeg »

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 FreeBSD blob driver will drive a monitor, but it lacks a bunch of GPU hardware support the Linux one has: all of CUDA, NVENC/NVDEC, I²C DDC, and certainly more.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#254

Post by magic_quotes »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #249
magic_quotes wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver. It's maintained while simultaneously not receiving any new features.

Note this includes support for newer cards, so its only a matter of time before FreeBSD support is EOL'd

New cards are fully supported. Why do you think they aren't?

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#255

Post by shaklee3 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #239
shaklee3 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I gave you an example of something you can't do, which is an overlap-save FFT, and you ignored that completely. Please implement it, or show me any example of someone implementing any custom FFT that's not a simple, standard, batched FFT. I'll take any example of implementing any type of signal processing pipeline on TPU, such as a 5G radio.

Your last sentence is pretty funny: a GPU can't do certain workloads because one it can do is too slow for you. Yet it remains a fact that TPU cannot do certain workloads without offloading to the CPU (making it orders of magnitude slower), and that's somehow okay? It seems where this discussion is going is you pointed to a TensorFlow library that may or may not offload to a TPU, and it probably doesn't. But even that library is incomplete to implement things like a 5G LDPC decoder.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#256

Post by non-entity »

loeg wrote: post #253
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…

The FreeBSD blob driver will drive a monitor, but it lacks a bunch of GPU hardware support the Linux one has: all of CUDA, NVENC/NVDEC, I²C DDC, and certainly more.

I knew it was too good to be true.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#258

Post by loeg »

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…

You say that, but: Nvidia's "blob" driver doesn't have CUDA, NVENC/NVDEC, nor DDC I2C support on FreeBSD — despite all of this functionality being specific to Nvidia's own hardware, and the support being present in the Linux blob, which runs on a relatively similar platform.

If the only differing bits were the portability framework, this would just be a matter of adding missing support. But it isn't — the FreeBSD object file Nvidia publishes lacks the internal symbols used by the Linux driver.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#259

Post by llukas »

justicezyx wrote: post #132
ibains wrote: post #50

I love this, I was amongst early engineers on CUDA (compilers). NVIDIA was so well run, but boxed into a smaller graphics card market - ATI and it were forced into low margins since they were made replaceable by OpenGL and DirectX standards. For the standard fans - they resulted a wealth transfer from NVIDIA to Apple etc. and reduced capital available for R&D. NVIDIA was constantly attacked by a much bigger Intel (wh…

The comment identified the positive side of the nvidia story. Note that nvidia had not had large acquisition for many years. This acquisition can be seen as a beacon of nvidia's past struggle against the market and the competitors. For whatever happened, nvidia innovated to their success, and had enabled possibly the biggest tech boom so far through deep learning. Might be one day everyone claimed nvidia to be the "m…

> The comment identified the positive side of the nvidia story. Note that nvidia had not had large acquisition for many years.

Not correct Mellanox was bought for $7B.

Re: Nvidia to Acquire Arm for $40B

#260

Post by dahart »

drivebycomment wrote: post #205
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're not wrong, but most of HN threads are like this. 80% of comments are low information, Dunning-Kruger effect in action. But among that, there are still some useful gems, so despite what you said, HN is still worth it. If you fold the first two top level comments, the rest have some useful , informed perspective. I don't see this as having that much of an impact on any short to medium term. ARM has too much intr…

> Humanity would be better off of a single ISA does become truly universal.

This is an interesting thought. I think I would agree with this in the CPU world of the last 20-30 years, but it makes me wonder a few things. Might a universal ISA eliminate major pieces of competitive advantage for chip makers, and/or stall innovation? It does feel like non-vector instructions are somewhat settled, but vector instructions haven't yet, and GPUs are changing rapidly (take NVIDIA's Tensor cores and ray tracing cores for example). With Moore's law coming to an end, a lot of people are talking about special purpose chips more and more, TPUs being a pretty obvious example, and as nice as it might be to settle on a universal ISA, it seems like we're all about to start seeing larger differences more frequently, no?

> 80% of comments are low information, Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

I really liked all of your comment except this. I have a specific but humble request aside from the negative commentary & assumption about behavior. Please consider erasing the term "Dunning-Kruger effect" from your mind. It is being used here incorrectly, and it is very widely misunderstood and abused. There is no such effect. The experiments in the paper do not show what was claimed, the paper absolutely does not support the popular notion that confidence is a sign of incompetence. (Please read the actual paper -- the experiments demonstrated a positive correlation between confidence and competence!) There have been some very wonderful analyses of how wrong the Dunning-Kruger paper was, yet most people only seem to remember the (incorrect) summary that confidence is a sign of incompetence.

https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...

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