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

[aht0]

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

Unless you can point out particular law being violated, be it US's or EU it's legal. Can't be "a bit legal or illegal" like women cannot be a bit pregnant.

Since they have perfect right to define rules covering the use of their own products as they wish, you as a consumer and customer have perfect right refrain from buying. Both sides happy.

[coder]

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.

What we have here is a market failure. Part of the problem is that CUDA is potentially subject to copyright protections, in the case of a similar ruling as the one in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle...v._Google,_Inc.

This is obviously an abuse/misinterpretation of copyright, but now that we know it can happen, it's probably why AMD was extra cautious in implementing HiP as a porting toolchain (https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP) rather than providing API/ABI-level CUDA compatibility. So, it means the market will take longer to adapt. In the meantime, Nvidia can milk their customers. Once the marketplace becomes more competitive, they can adapt by adjusting their product offerings, pricing structure, and/or license terms.

[coder]

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.

Unless they actually defined "Data Center", then you should be aware that creative lawyers can and will bend that definition to include things like server rooms or even potentially computer labs. You need to dig into the meat of the specific language they used before deciding whether it potentially applies to specific universities and departments.

[coder]

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.

Religion, nationalism, feudalism, charity, conscription, and slavery are all proven methods of doing things at scale. It's just that capitalism seems the most flexible, robust, and potentially fair. But just because you have a really nice hammer doesn't automatically turn every problem into a nail.

[xorbe]

And you wonder why nvidia wanted to move to email logins on consumer hardware.

[coder]

Meh. There's no "may be trying". They've 100% achieved this years ago. Not de juro, but de facto.

You can’t use consumer GPUs in datacenters

Lol. He thinks the only reason they switched from end-mounted power connectors to top-mounted is to screw people trying to put them in server cases?

He's completely ignoring that many desktop cases are length-constrained but have extra room along the top edge of the card. This is simply the most pragmatic arrangement for desktop cases. And I seriously doubt their board partners are prevented from making boards with end-mounted power connectors. He's got to provide some evidence of this, rather than pure speculation.

He's also wrong about dimensions. You could have a 4U case with vertically-oriented desktop GPU cards. Only 3U is too short to accommodate the top-mounted power connector.

[starshipeleven]

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.

In those cases you can (and usually do) rent computing power from other universities or third party data centers or computing nodes or whatever. Many supercomputers are rented on a per-hour basis to run some calculations for someone. Costs quite a bit.

And that NVIDIA licence applies to data centers in particular, not to universities.

"data center" is a generic term, it can also mean the physical place (room or building) you put the computing hardware in. And yes, NVIDIA lawyers aren't retarded. They decided to stay generic on purpose.

And whole university has budget sufficiently big that it could allow professional grade cards instead of consumer-grade.

That's nonsense on two levels.

1. budgeting isn't a choice taken by some god-like figure that decides where to spend money for all departments down to white A4 paper and printer supplies, and is also all-knowing enough to make wise choices on everything. The budget is split to each department's head manager, and then depending on how it goes it may be split more (may have sub-departments or something else). Those that decide to buy hardware for their department or subdepartment only have a relatively small amount of money, which usually covers the expenses and salaries and little more.
To get more funding they need to escalate the requests and convince those above them (which may need to do the same with their superiors). And this process can be interrupted very easily at any time by one of the superiors that decides it's not worth it, note that managers and superiors don't usually know the details of all sciences, so they can't really say if the requests to get "new and cool instrument X" are actually a good idea or not, and convincing them is not straightforward. The higher the price of the "new cool instrument", the higher the difficulty.
So yeah, total budget is relatively high, but does not mean each branch can easily get access to large sums of money beyond their immediate needs because chain of command and bureaucracy (and ignorance).

2. GPUs are a tool, a means to an end. When you gotta get a job done, you don't care of stickers. On quite a bit of computing loads you don't need ECC VRAM or higher buffers or whatever, you only need raw power, low power consumption and other more mundane things. And if that is the point, then it is simply stupid to buy more expensive cards just because you are big and wealthy (and stupid).

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.

That just says they waste money. Due to the fact (explained above) that budget decisions involve social skills, every academic institution (or human organization for that matter) burns money on bullshit just because someone knew how to sell his idea better than the others (or bribed his way around).

[starshipeleven]

Religion, nationalism, feudalism, charity, conscription, and slavery are all proven methods of doing things at scale. It's just that capitalism seems the most flexible, robust, and potentially fair. But just because you have a really nice hammer doesn't automatically turn every problem into a nail.

Neither scales anywhere near well enough to base a modern society on. There is a reason if all historical examples in richer nations died off centuries ago, any surviving examples are relegated to less-developed countries or became little more than scams (Religion and Nationalism I'm looking at you).

Back then in the day when they were still effective and trendy, the situation was different:
-world population was much less overall
-crappy communication and transportation meant that the actual amount of people that could interact with each other on a daily basis was tiny

So while whole nations were using slaves or were feudal kingdoms it still does not mean the above were good enough at the scales required now. Their total population was like a few million individuals and most commoners never interacted with people from outside their village.
In these situations the method to "get the job done" only needs to work at village-like or small-modern-city scale.

[bridgman]

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.

Please stop parroting this before another generation grows up with a corrupted "me me me" view of the world and makes things even worse.

The purpose of a business is to provide goods and services on a larger scale than is possible for an individual, and while doing this requires a certain amount of gross profit (for salaries, bonuses, benefits, R&D etc..) and net profit (interest on borrowed funds, return on invested funds, supporting growth) the primary purpose of a business is still the net value it adds to society.

The problem we have today is that too many people are investing in companies with the idea that "making as much money as possible" is the goal, and when those people end up in a majority ownership position they distort the guidance given to management, which in turn leads to short-horizon decision making, out-of-control off-shoring and "right-sizing", debasing of respected brand names, unethical/illegal behaviour and a host other things we would be better off without.

We need to draw a line between "reasonable reward" and "greed" - greed is what makes capitalism fail over time, not what makes it succeed.

[coder]

Neither scales anywhere near well enough to base a modern society on. There is a reason if all historical examples in richer nations died off centuries ago, any surviving examples are relegated to less-developed countries or became little more than scams (Religion and Nationalism I'm looking at you).

Huh. I don't know that we necessarily disagree, but your earlier statement was definitely too simplistic and reductionist. If we're being honest, it should be clear that capitalism isn't the only way to organize humans towards larger goals.

When it comes to getting people to act independent of (and even against) their own self interest, such as entering into highly life-threatening situations, capitalism is much less efficient & effective than nationalism and religion. But they've accomplishing a great many things that would be difficult for capitalism, even today, if only because there's not enough potential profit to justify them. Perhaps one of the shining examples would be visiting the Moon nearly 50 years ago. Though capitalism played an essential role, but neither profit nor scientific curiosity were adequate to motivate such an undertaking.

Furthermore, there are lots of people who devote significant time & energy towards serving others, even in a secular context. Humans are neither perfectly rational market participants nor entirely motivated by greed. We all know this, but it's sometimes crowded out by the need for logical self-consistency of certain ideologies.

Corporations, on the other hand, are motivated solely and pathologically by greed. It's in their charter. It's their only mandate. If shareholders see management failing to maximize the profits and/or the well-being of a corporation, CEOs get replaced and lawsuits get filed. Not that I'm opposed to corporations - that focus can be vital to their effectiveness. But we should see that they act in ways that would rightly earn any human the label of an extreme sociopath. So, it's necessary to bound their behavior with regulatory guard rails to harness their greed in service of society and be wary of their attempts to co-opt society in service of their interests.