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

[aht0]

Isn't that "ends justify the means?". What if Nvidia decided it liked cryptominers more than you and made a new driver update that had the license "This is not to be used for gaming"? Who is Nvidia to tell you what you can do with the card you BOUGHT from them? It's the principle

Bring a bit more reasonable example to the table. I'd have fucking loved it if Nvidia had left block chain exception out of their license as well. Gaming cards purpose is fucking gaming, after all.

Cryptominers want to make quick buck? - cough it up first and use " professional" grade cards. It would also finish of flood of semi-dead gaming cards on second hand markets.

Academics, Universities? - moneys moving there are sufficiently big that they CAN afford buying 5k USD cards instead of 800USD cards. For example I just read article how in our local university one scientist received grant for 300k euros (cancer study). And it's not that big of a grant.

[pmorph]

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

Nonsense.
In capitalism you stay in business by providing products that offer better value than your competition. People won't give you their money just because you are greedy.

[starshipeleven]

Academics, Universities? - moneys moving there are sufficiently big that they CAN afford buying 5k USD cards instead of 800USD cards. For example I just read article how in our local university one scientist received grant for 300k euros (cancer study). And it's not that big of a grant.

I like how you assume that all academics/universities in the world must be crawling with cash to throw at problems just because you think your local one is.

In general it's not true. They do have a lot of money because they don't run on love and prayers, but it's always never enough to pay for all researchers. And any researcher will do all he can to maximize the cost-effectiveness of his equipment, because if he can get double the processing power at the same price, you can bet your ass that he will do that instead of paying more to get a more "certified" GPU.

I'd like to point out that 300k euro can be OK a smallish research project, using research machinery is expensive (especially when you have to lend it from someone else) and also test kits (chemical consumables to make tests and stuff) are expensive. Unless the prices in your country are dramatically different from the richer countries where I live, but I doubt it for high-end things like this.

[starshipeleven]

blocked post for aht0 above.

[starshipeleven]

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.

Making the most money possible is called "greed", and the whole capitalistic system is based on what is basically "greed".

I didn't make moral judgements, I just stated facts for what they are. If you are offended by mere facts it's your own problem.

There is no other system that works on decent scales than "greed" to get people to throw resources at problems, so... whatever. There isn't other choices.

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.

Or that stifle innovation for the sake of their own profit. Which is where hating them is acceptable. It's also somewhat common.

Take Elon Musk for a very blatant and simple case. In all fields his companies are strong innovators. Before him we had basically 0 chance in hell to get a serious attempt at making an electric car. Why? Because all automotive industry isn't giving a fuck, they just milk consumers with marketing and find ways to save on their own costs.

Same for rocketry, or for public transportation.

Why is he so innovative? Because he is following a dream. His companies are not just about making money. If you just follow profit then innovation is not the first thing you look at unless you are forced to do so by the context.

And this is called "The company's Vision" in manager-speak. Some long-term goal that isn't just amassing more money. Sure profit is still a goal, just not the only one.

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.

Still not a good reason to suck the dick of all wealthy indiscriminately like you are doing in this post. To keep your own analogy, only a few subset of all the wealthy around were even interested in investing in your businness.

Wealthy does not automatically mean they are good, smart or useful.

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.

No no no. That's not my point. I questioned what kind of support NVIDIA cards have at all, because in pretty much all cases I know, support for these things beyond basic "Hi I'm Ajing how can I help you" India-based totally useless "customer support" requires a paid support contract two companies.

In that case it's irrelevant what the client uses, NVIDIA can ramp up the cost of the support contract accordingly.

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.

It is also true that if you know your shit well enough to take shortcuts without getting burned you can still come out on top. Also there isn't just big data users, in quite a few cases you don't care of 100% accuracy and reliability.

For example I know a few companies with rendering nodes that went the cheap way, and this boosted their productivity by a lot.

Do they have crashes or corruptions every once in a while? Yes. Does that impact them? Not much, as it is rare enough that they don't lose much time in running again the rendering, and the performance increase makes these minor inconveniences totally worth it.

Really, this is just a greed vs greed battle. NVIDIA's greed vs some other company's greed.

[TheBlackCat]

Academics, Universities? - moneys moving there are sufficiently big that they CAN afford buying 5k USD cards instead of 800USD cards. For example I just read article how in our local university one scientist received grant for 300k euros (cancer study). And it's not that big of a grant.

Are you kidding? That is a huge grant. My lab would love to have even a single grant that big. And yet that grant would maybe barely fund two postdocs to actually do the research (assuming it is a 5-year grant, which seems to be typical). And even assuming it is purely computational work, that is only salary, without any actual equipment, infrastructure, or staff. Say they are using 20 cards, 5k vs. 800 is the difference between having one postdoc or two. Nobody cares if the computation happens even twice as fast, that is only a tiny part of the actual work. But having twice as many people doing work means having twice as many papers out.

[starshipeleven]

What a bunch of nut jobs! Everything isn't a crazy al-Qaeda conspiracy theory. NVidia is just keeping our data centers safe and secure so they can process "big data" (large amounts of bad data that doesn't really matter, except if you care about privacy.)

Damn, it's already back from holidays. Man, working at NSA is exhausting.

Luckily North Korea doesn't have to support filthy stinking rich people like Shuttworth so they can focus on important things.. like a Linux-based ICBM guidance system that uses Stellarium data instead of GPS satellites.

They only have very crappy inertial guidance systems they scavenged from some old soviet/chinese surplus crap. It's not like they really need to be able to hit anyone with them anyway.

Although celestial navigation systems exist and are in use for satellites or spacecraft that need more precision than what civilian GPS can provide (or go out of range like most probes).

[duby229]

Nonsense.
In capitalism you stay in business by providing products that offer better value than your competition. People won't give you their money just because you are greedy.

Well, maybe. We've all heard the history about laissez faire. That's the scenario that's capable of going full blown greed, but no economy exists today that would allow that scenario to happen. Governments regulate their economies for good reasons.

[aht0]

I like how you assume that all academics/universities in the world must be crawling with cash to throw at problems just because you think your local one is.

In general it's not true. They do have a lot of money because they don't run on love and prayers, but it's always never enough to pay for all researchers. And any researcher will do all he can to maximize the cost-effectiveness of his equipment, because if he can get double the processing power at the same price, you can bet your ass that he will do that instead of paying more to get a more "certified" GPU.

I'd like to point out that 300k euro can be OK a smallish research project, using research machinery is expensive (especially when you have to lend it from someone else) and also test kits (chemical consumables to make tests and stuff) are expensive. Unless the prices in your country are dramatically different from the richer countries where I live, but I doubt it for high-end things like this.

If particular university lacks some sort of data center that particular researcher/scientist could make use of, it's pretty darn unlikely she/he would have resources for setting up her/his own. And that NVIDIA licence applies to data centers in particular, not to universities. And whole university has budget sufficiently big that it could allow professional grade cards instead of consumer-grade.

Local university here is not the richest (former USSR) but at least it's "clinic component" runs Oracle DB on Solaris platform. Which ain't exactly cheapskate option.

[onicsis]

This restriction sounds illegal to me. It's like Intel or AMD would forbid games to be played on systems with low end CPUs.