261–270 of 784 posts
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> 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
The latest FreeBSD driver is 450.66, published 2020-8-18. Supports RTX 20xx, GTX 16xx, GTX 10xx, and older.
Does this mean Nvidia will have to deal with the hot mess at China ARM?
I see this going a few ways for different players: The perpetual architecture license folks that make their own cores like Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Fujitsu (I think they needed this for the A64FX, right?) will be fine, and may just fork off on the ARMv8.3 spec, adding a few instructions here or there. Apple especially will be fine as they can get code into LLVM for whatever "Apple Silicon" evolves into over time…
Samsung, Qualcomm, and MediaTek all currently just use off the shelf A5x & A7x cores in their SoCs. Unless that part of the company is losing money I don't expect nVidia to cut that off. Especially since that's likely a key part of why nVidia acquired ARM in the first place - I can't imagine they care about the Mali team(s) or IP.
EDIT: correction, make that the last generation or four (oops, time flies)
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I doubt Apple is dumb enough not to have basically a perpetual license for ARM.
I would also agree, the thing is - businesses breakup and come together all the time. If it makes sense and both parties can agree despite of past disagrements and lawsuits, they will partner. Just because Apple and nVidia has bad relationship at the moment regarding their GPUs is probably orthogonal to what they'll do with this new branch of nVidia, that is ARM.
True about frenemies the entire time that Apple was suing Samsung, it was using Samsung to manufacture many of its components.
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…
The problem is more that AMD is sleeping in regard of GPU AI and good software interfaces.
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A TPU is a chip you cannot program. It's purpose built and can't run the fraction of the type of workloads that a GPU can.
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?
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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…
> The HN crowd is incredibly biased against certain companies. No kidding, regarding the HN crowd. -- every time I post a comment criticizing Apple's monopoly and policies I get downvoted to oblivion, and I'd say that some of the things they do e.g. on the Apple store and proprietary hardware/software combinations are far more egregious than anything Nvidia has ever done. The HN algorithm basically encourages an echo…
This sort of $BigCo metaflamewar in which each side accuses HN of being shills for the opposite side is incredibly repetitive and tedious. It's also a cognitive bias; everyone feels like the community (and the moderators for that matter) is biased against whatever view they favor.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
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I'm a TPU user and I'd be interested to see a specific example of something that can be done on TPU but not GPU. Perhaps I'm just not experienced enough with the programming model, but I've found them to be strictly less flexible/more tricky than GPUs, especially for things like conditional execution, multiple graphs, variable size inputs and custom ops.
Sure! I'd love to chat TPUs. There's a #tpu discord channel on the MLPerf discord: https://github.com/shawwn/tpunicorn#ml-community The central reason that TPUs feel less flexible is Google's awful mistake in encouraging everyone to use TPUEstimator as the One True API For Doing TPU Programming. Getting off that API was the single biggest boost to my TPU skills. You can see an example of how to do that here: https://…
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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 obj…
In fact it is. For Linux and FreeBSD Nvidia distributes exactly the same blob for compilation into nvidia.ko; the blobs for nvidia-modeset.ko are slightly different. (Don't take my word for it, download both drivers and compare kernel/nvidia/nv-kernel.o_binary with src/nvidia/nv-kernel.o.) Nothing is locked in the closed source part.
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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 powe…
1. The continued conglomeratization in the tech sector is a worrying trend as we see fewer and fewer small players.
2. Only a large-ish company could provide effective competition in the CPU/ISA/architecture space against the current x86 duopoly.