1y ago

Nvidia's AI customers are scared to be seen courting other AI chipmakers for fear of retaliatory shipment delays, says rival firm

www.tomshardware.com

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/9700996

Nvidia's AI customers are scared to be seen courting other AI chipmakers for fear of retaliatory shipment delays, says rival firm

64 comments

That should be your very first clue that Nvidia needs to be broken up into smaller, competing companies.
- And CUDA forcefully open sourced.
  
  Until then you can use ZlUDA
  
  Yikes, how Draconian. Id be fucking pissed if someone came in and forcibly open sourced a product I had invested millions in developing.
- Nvidlets?
- Thank dog that their ARM purchase got torpedoed.
- How do you imagine that would work?
  
  Yeah, don't be unrealistic. We can't just have a group of competent individuals properly plan out how to dismantle a monopoly to allow for proper competition in the industry. If they don't hold onto their monopoly, how will we ever see technological advancements?
  
  Limit them producing PCIe cards to low volume reference models and require their software to be open source to break that aspect of the lock-in, that's the two big things. As alternative to the latter, require them to have actual platform docs, right now they're not only providing the only compiler for their cards which is deliberately incompatible with everything else they're also making sure that noone else can get performance out of NVidia cards without excessive reverse-engineering, some things are even locked down hard via firmware signing. Splitting AI off from GPU would be a bonus.
Monopolies gonna monopoly. Fuck Jensen.
- AMD had decades to see where the wind was blowing and offer a first-party CUDA bridge.
  NVIDIA earned this monopoly through business savvy predictions.
  
  Built? Sure. Earned? That's a stretch. Deserved? Fuck no.
  
  Ever heard of OpenCL? AMD started that project. CUDA is closed source.
  What kind of hedge fund, MBA, anti-consumer chud counts it as a point AGAINST a company for developing open source technologies when they could have easily closed their IP warchest and offered a first-party CUDA bridge? AMD actively chose to embrace the open source world rather than further enabling a CUDA monopoly. IMO, every computer user in the world owes AMD a debt of gratitude for their contributions to open source technologies like OpenCL.
  I can tell you’re a Windows user because if you used Linux for even a single day (you know, the kernel that is the industry standard for virtually ALL internet servers including Microsoft’s), you’d know all too well that NVidia is objectively hostile to open source technologies and the consumers who are unwitting victims of their anti-competitive, closed source technologies.
  
  NVIDIA earned this monopoly through business savvy predictions.
  There's no such thing as earning a monopoly. Even in theory a monopoly can be earned only for an infinitely small moment, until that monopoly is a result of perpetuating itself.
  And since this is intuitively obvious, I'd say every person talking about "earning a monopoly" just cannot imagine more honest ways of being successful.
  
  Good business sense in the past does not give them a free pass to now assfuck every consumer (both individual and B2B) so he can buy more leather jackets. Fuck wealth-extracting corporate monopolies, fuck Jensen. Do not support such behavior.
  
  That's like saying the burgler earned his robbery just because he was business savvy.
  
  Nobody "earns a monopoly". I'll take advocating for the public trust over ethical bankruptcy. I'm not aware of anytime that nVidia did anything in fairness, only through high pressure antitrust tactics that border on illegal. Fuck Jensen and fuck nVidia.
  
  through business savvy predictions.
  More like through shoving its solutions onto everyone around.
  And nope, "earn" is a wrong word.
If only there were some sort of anti-monopoly laws that existed and were actually enforced…
- The FTC has at least been going after companies again, but their targeting priorities seem very strange. They seem to like picking impossible fights they can't win, rather than cases like these.
  
  Antitrust isn't about just a binary win or loss. A lot of the cases, the FTC/DOJ has been losing because of concessions made by the merging parties. By showing a willingness to fight on mergers, the FTC is influencing the structure of mergers where merging companies are now willing to specifically identify business units to be spun off or sold.
  Microsoft/Activision agreed to terms that would prevent their biggest titles from going Xbox exclusive. The Court that allowed the merger to go through specifically cited public statements and legally binding contracts as part of the reason why that deal could go through. The willingness to fight forced Microsoft to preserve some level of competition.
  And a lot of the other deals haven't gone through. The FTC successfully blocked the merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. The Nvidia/ARM deal was blocked. So was the Amazon/iRobot deal.
  The smaller deals they've successfully blocked are also shifting the legal landscape on how courts view these deals. Nobody outside of biotech is familiar with names like Illumina/Grail, but that FTC win is a big deal for applying to a vertical merger between companies operating at different points of a supply chain, rather than a horizontal merger between direct competitors.
  The heightened regulatory scrutiny is chilling mergers, even before they get to the point of FTC review, too. So there is some concrete effect here.
Lol hilarious watching companies be ruthless then scramble to keep shit together since they only want to line exec pockets and don't tackle real issues
Fuck them, their customers, fuck their execs 🤞
- Fuck them, their customers, fuck their execs
  I expect nothing less out of a tech sub filled with people who were too left leaning for even Reddit.
  
  Are you an Nvidia employee with stock options or something? It's so WEIRD to see you all over this comment section saying they are one of the most valuable companies in the world and by that logic DON'T NEED YOU to defend them, lol.
  
  You're presenting such convincing arguments.
  How is this person wrong? Or did you just come here to tell people their are leftist? Then why come here, if you don't like that? Seems like self harming behavior ....
  
  no one is forcing you to stay
I guess the monopoly has to be preserved, so that Mr. Jensen has pocket money for another leather jacket.
I did some contract work for nvidia a few years ago to build out a data center for a client in the domain of pharmaceutical research. I've never worked for any employer more hypersensitive and narcissistic than nvidia. They will waste your time and fire you on the spot if you voice any concerns.
I wonder who this riva^(md)l is.
Gaussian, the molecular modeling software company, liked to do similar shit.
No way they would do something like that!

64 comments