NVIDIA May Be Trying To Prevent GeForce GPUs From Being Used In Data Centers

[TMM_]

This all boils down to your definition of 'pragmatic' for me it means what can I do tomorrow. For a lot of people it means what can I do right now. Free software is not your enemy, users. It's for you.

[gnufreex]

Nvidia can be translated from the italian " invidia", meaning "envy". That always explained a lot.

Russians call it nenavidia which means hateidia.

[Spooktra]

Choices of a for-profit company are usually motivated by greed, one way or another. Even avoiding costs associated with support calls is eventually greed.

I take it you have never run a business of any kind. The purpose of a business it to, wait for it, MAKE MONEY and as much of it as it can. That's how they have money to pay salaries, bonuses, benefits, hire more people, R&D, etc.

I know it's become very fashionable to hate on the wealthy but it's the wealthy among us, those with the disposable income, that create jobs, bring new products and services to market and innovate.

No poor person ever gave me a job, no poor person ever invested in my business or gave me a loan or extended me credit, it's the wealthy that do that.

Avoiding unnecessary costs is a good thing for a company, if NVIDIA's customers are buying up cheaper gaming cards and trying to use them in a manner that they were not designed to be used, and consequently making calls to the company to try and resolve their issues it would be to everyone's benefit to steer these big data users to the correct product line.

I have learned the hard way, there is no such thing as a free lunch, there are usually hidden costs associated with going the cheap route, costs that aren't easily seen until something goes wrong.

For big data, companies should be using pro caliber cards, with certified drivers, large frame buffers and ECC ram.

[cl333r]

I for one support Nvidia thanks to their greed. If you're against greed you're against capitalism itself, you're promoting communism.

[duby229]

I for one support Nvidia thanks to their greed. If you're against greed you're against capitalism itself, you're promoting communism.

That's not true at all. Every capitalist market in the world is regulated by it's government. For the -very- reason to prevent both greed -and- communism. Government regulation is the trick discovered more than 2500 years ago.... It's not new....

[coder]

this is a blatant violation of the rights the consumers have of using their products in the way they see fit

In what country do you live? In the US, consumers stopped having any such rights a long time ago.

Also, this is a software license agreement. Restrictive EULAs are nothing new.

[coder]

I agree with you, but keep in mind that data centers are powered by companies, so they are not consumers.

Not necessarily, and it feels like a false distinction - especially when we don't know exactly what they consider a "data center". Would they consider a small server room to be a data center?

[coder]

Well I still believe unenforceable terms are just as good as no terms at all.

Enforcement might simply be limited to denying support calls and warranty claims. Their point might be that the GTX products aren't engineered to withstand 24/7 operation (though it's odd they carve out an exemption for crypto-mining).

[coder]

in words of Jen-Hsun Huang: "NVIDIA is a software company". So expecting an open source driver or specs from them for their lucrative bussines of Software Drivers is out of the question (and expect more safeguards in their hardware to stop any open source attempt to do an open driver). Of course their employees can't say this publicly.

He probably just means that their goal is to have margins closer to that of a software company than hardware. And I wouldn't be surprised if their software engineers outnumbered the hardware engineers by a decent amount.

But there are plenty of open source-based software companies, like Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc. ...and even to some extent Google & Facebook. So, the mere fact of being structured as a software company doesn't rule out the possibility of playing somewhat nicely with open source.

[coder]

More likely than naught though data centers and render farms will dump nvidia for amd though.

This is wishful thinking. Most datacenter users are using their Tesla products. This, in spite of AMD long having a price/performance advantage (at least, until recently).

https://www.karlrupp.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/gflops-sp.png

Perhaps they're concerned that a bunch of deep learning customers will suddenly switch to using Titan V, but whether it's due to that or a longer trend towards using consumer hardware, I think this move is pretty squarely aimed at the deep learning market. And in that case, the V100 is completely unanswered from AMD. We're talking 120 fp16 TFLOPS vs. 25 for Vega 64.