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

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81–90 of 313 posts

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

#81
post #56
post #34

I for one would welcome this. Firstly, as mentioned, it gives people incentive to look into RiscV. That aside, for far too long QCOM has had a monopoly on the phone chip market. Patents aside, which increasingly became irrelevant due to the death of Sprint, their major advantage has always been in Adreno, which as far as I remember AMD basically did for them. Mali is terrible. If Nvidia could revamp ARM graphics at t…

It will be the end of Linux on ARM. They will choke platform with blobs until the inevitable death. NVIDIA and open-source is like matter and antimatter - they simply cannot coexist in the same place and time.

You nailed it. Nvidia's refusal on releasing sufficient technical information and noncooperation with the FOSS community is already self-evident on multiple platforms.

Need to play the "Blob" song by OpenBSD.

https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#39

> Blob was popular at school he was helpful too / He could get your motor runnin' / with a drop of goo / He was givin' it away never charged a dime / But by the time he graduated / Blob was business slime!

> He was a blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah

> He's givin' you the Evil Eye!

> Now everybody had it / they was drivin' around / They was givin' up their freedoms / for convenience now / Blobbin' up the freeway, water black as pitch And somehow little Blobby was a growin' rich!

> He was a blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah

> It's linkin' time!

> Now it was out of control / n' fishy's came to depend / on Blobby's Blob Blah, seemed to be no end / Then his empire spread and to their surprise / Blobby been a growin' to incredible size!

> He's a blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah blah blah blah blah / blah blah B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b

> Then along came a genius Doctor Puffystein / And he battled the Blob / who had crossed the line / He was 50 feet tall — Doctor said "No fear" / I got a sample of Blob I can reverse engineer!

> But it was too late! / Blob was takin' over the world! / He wants your video! / Ya he wants your net! / He wants your drive! / He wants it all!!

> Somebody help us! / Noooooooo!

> NVIDIA! / Intel! / Atheros! / 3-Ware! / VIA! / ATI! / Broadcom! / TI! / Myricom! / HighPoint! / Adaptec! / Mylex! / ICP Vortex! / and IBM!

> Takin' over the world!

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

#82
post #3

Sounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity. "most of the licensees are competitors of Nvidia" Is this true? It seems like quite a stretch. Nvidia doesn't offer a chipset for the mobile, battery powered market(it tried, and gave up because of competition from Qualcomm).

> Sounds like a protectionist who doesn't want ARM to be owned by any foreign entity. Should've thought of that before they sold it to a Japanese fund.

Well, he has according to the article.

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

#83
post #8

I'm in agreement. nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others does not make this sound like a good deal, especially for entrenched ARM vendors. (Apple won't be phased; they basically design everything themselves, so they don't really even care about the direction of ARM or the architecture. They could hard fork tomorrow, or two years ago, and nobody will notice since they're entirely vertically integrated.) Bu…

Interestingly NVIDIA uses a RISC-V core in their GPUs.

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

#84
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others": can you elaborate or mention an example? That aspect has escaped me thus far.

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.

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

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others": can you elaborate or mention an example? That aspect has escaped me thus far.

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…

While is was probably a factor, I believe it's also because NVIDIA refuses to let Apple modify their drivers to push their Metal API.

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

#86
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others": can you elaborate or mention an example? That aspect has escaped me thus far.

Google it maybe? Here's one example thread to pull at: why did Apple stop buying nVidia GPUs across their entire hardware line? EGLStreams is a recent pain in the ass. nVidia's infanticide of OpenCL with CUDA being another painful reminder that nVidia doesn't care about your software needs, just their own. It's really not hard to find a company that nVidia's pissed off with its dealings.

If there was an infanticide of OpenCL, Apple (the original creator of OpenCL) was at least as responsible as Nvidia.

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mali is terrible care to elaborate? the Panfrost project has reverse engineered a bunch of popular Mali ISAs and now there's hardware support on the kernel for VA-API on these chips. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=search&q=Panfrost

> has reverse engineered a bunch of popular Mali ISAs As a FOSS user and developer, this is already a big problem to me. Although the situation of Nvidia's mobile GPUs (e.g. Tegra) is a bit better than desktop GPUs, but not much better.

Why is it a problem for there to be additional hardware usable with open source drivers? Or is it that it was reverse engineered?

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

#88
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has reverse engineered a bunch of popular Mali ISAs As a FOSS user and developer, this is already a big problem to me. Although the situation of Nvidia's mobile GPUs (e.g. Tegra) is a bit better than desktop GPUs, but not much better.

Why is it a problem for there to be additional hardware usable with open source drivers? Or is it that it was reverse engineered?

The problem is not reverse engineering, but having to reverse engineer.

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

#89
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a problem for there to be additional hardware usable with open source drivers? Or is it that it was reverse engineered?

The problem is not reverse engineering, but having to reverse engineer.

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.

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

#90
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"nVidia's history of not playing nicely with others": can you elaborate or mention an example? That aspect has escaped me thus far.

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

I had no idea, so I just searched and found there are 201 repositories in their github:

https://github.com/NVIDIA

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