Nvidia Wants To Prohibit Consumer GPU Use In Datacenters (theregister.co.uk) 312
The Register reports:
Nvidia has banned the use of its GeForce and Titan gaming graphics cards in data centers -- forcing organizations to fork out for more expensive gear, like its latest Tesla V100 chips. The chip-design giant updated its GeForce and Titan software licensing in the past few days, adding a new clause that reads: "No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted."
Long-time Slashdot reader Xesdeeni has a few questions: Is this really even legal? First, because it changes use of existing hardware, already purchased, by changing software (with potentially required bug fixes) agreements retroactively. Second, because how can a customer (at least in the U.S.) be told they can't use a product in a particular place, unless it's a genuine safety or security concern (i.e. government regulation)!?
Nvidia expects that "working together with our user base on a case-by-case basis, we will be able to resolve any customer concerns," they told CNBC, adding that "those who don't download new drivers won't be held to the new terms."
Long-time Slashdot reader Xesdeeni has a few questions: Is this really even legal? First, because it changes use of existing hardware, already purchased, by changing software (with potentially required bug fixes) agreements retroactively. Second, because how can a customer (at least in the U.S.) be told they can't use a product in a particular place, unless it's a genuine safety or security concern (i.e. government regulation)!?
Nvidia expects that "working together with our user base on a case-by-case basis, we will be able to resolve any customer concerns," they told CNBC, adding that "those who don't download new drivers won't be held to the new terms."
Obstacle! (Score:4, Funny)
Competition? (Score:5, Funny)
Just two laws are needed:
1) Everything bad is forbidden.
2) Everything good is mandatory.
Prediction: Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe Systems, and Nvidia will combine and become one company, known as MOAN.
We'll all be moaning about MOAN.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
They're leveraging their near-monopoly on GPU-compute and naturally if you have a near monopoly you'll move to exploit that any way you can. I'm thinking this is either (1) a good opportunity for somebody else to come along with new, cheaper compute hardware and make a killing or (2) an anti-trust issue that regulators can take up.
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Which leads me to suspect AMD would very much be happy to take whatever business NVIDIA could lose if the high performance compute crowd rises in anger.
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They're leveraging their near-monopoly on GPU-compute and naturally if you have a near monopoly you'll move to exploit that any way you can.
Naturally, assuming that you are immoral and unethical, and willing to skate around the fringes of criminal wrongdoing. Interestingly, AMD is the go to vendor for crypto currency mining, I see that as writing on the wall for Nvidias top 500 game. To tell the truth, Nvidia as a company makes me retch and I would refuse to have anything to do with them even if they had the best hardware, which they do not.
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A few of Microsoft's abuses. No time for many. (Score:3)
Embrace, extend, and extinguish [wikipedia.org] "... a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors."
Microsoft no longer sells a usable operating system. Windows 10 is possibly the worst [networkworld.com]
Re: Competition? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Halloween documents aren't good enough for you?
The Halloween Documents were 20 years ago, when Microsoft was managed by a completely different group of people. The documents describe a strategy of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" that would never work today.
Microsoft is still evil, but their evilness today is very different than it was 20 years ago.
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The Halloween documents were just Bill Gates telling Steve Ballmer to make sure there were adequate supplies of candy available for trick or treaters.
You know.... (Score:5, Insightful)
...just because you plaster something in a license doesn't make it automatically law.
Re:You know.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Its not law, its a contract. And unfortunately they likely get away with it as its software.
When I originally heard this story I assumed they were going to say that the warranty on consumer cards wouldn't be honoured if used in a data center which wouldn't have been unreasonable.
Re:You know.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Which probably contains security holes that make it unfit for use in a data center. Sticking with an old version of GPU drivers is simply not a viable option, and anybody even suggesting otherwise should be stripped naked and dragged through the streets behind a Brinks truck on national television for all to see. It is the computer security equivalent of saying, "It doesn't matter if the fuel tank in that Ford Pinto is so thin and right in front of the rear bumper."
If this is legal (I'm pretty sure it isn't), then it's way past time for some serious changes to copyright law and contract law. No sane society can afford to allow a company to make arbitrary changes the license agreement on critical device drivers that are required for hardware to function properly and that must be kept up-to-date to keep a system secure. After all, if they can change these terms of sale retroactively, what's to stop them from deciding three years from now that the Tesla V100 drivers are no longer licensed for data center use, and you're required to upgrade to the Tesla V600 if you want to keep using it in a data center? One year from now? Six months?
Even if NVIDIA manages to find a way to avoid losing every lawsuit that arises from this suicidally stupid decision, I have to wonder why in h*** any data center purchaser in his/her right should mind even CONSIDER NVIDIA hardware in the future, knowing that NVIDIA might arbitrarily change their licensing terms in a way that forces them to sell all their hardware at a loss and replace it at any time?
This really should bankrupt NVIDIA in a just world. It's that heinous. And IMO, someone should be fired for even suggesting such an appalling change to their hardware licensing retroactively.
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This is true as the majority of driver updates are to add support and optimization for games, if you use the driver from when the 1080 TI and Titan X came out, it will be the same performance without the stupid clause in it.
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Also the clause is vague:
What does "datacenter deployment" mean?
If I create a special facility with 50 desktops stacked on top of each other with nVIDIA GPUs, is that a datacenter? If Yes, then how is an internet cafe or school computer lab with 1 desktop per student not a datacenter? If Not, then how is 1000 computers stacked a datacenter?
Re: You know.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: You know.... (Score:5, Funny)
We know this but, as an Apple user, he doesn't.
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It's almost like the old days when you could tell somebody on the internet was an AOL user.
Re: You know.... (Score:4, Funny)
http://bash.org/?14207 [bash.org]
Kind of amusing that iOS users have become the equivalent of AOLers given how snooty Apple users tend to be.
Re: You know.... (Score:2)
Ain't no problem here.
Re: (Score:2)
Or, maybe slashdot should get with the times and accept the facts that:
1) Mobile devices and browsers exist and are good enough to actually use; for some people, as their primary means of accessing the internet.
2) Unicode is a thing.
It's not as if either of those developments is new. And I sure don't see work being done anywhere else on Slashdot that would reasonably be soaking up so much development time as to prevent them from correctly handling a worldwide-standard character encoding.
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I want it to auto-detect when people post from un-bugfixed iOS devices. It can 'fix' the punctuation bug for them, but then automatically plop a little tagline on the bottom of the comment reading:
--Posted using my iGadget!
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No thanks. Don't need a ton of bullshit character spam.
archive.is copy of license (Score:2)
This is really an attempt at legal evil genius (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't see NVIDIA going after people who install the software in a datacenter. I see them using this licensing clause to quash lawsuits from people who do violate the terms, and end up having some sort of issue running the hardware where NVIDIA could be held liable. Be it something extreme like a fire from overheating, to a chip-level problem like what Intel has recently been going through You're running this software/hardware in a datacenter, and we told you not to. Liability absolved...maybe.
Re:This is really an attempt at legal evil genius (Score:4, Informative)
and end up having some sort of issue running the hardware where NVIDIA could be held liable.
This. The amount of time I had to spend debugging application issues because someone had the great idea to run a rig stuffed with gaming cards 24/7 instead of using hardware that is certified to last is insane. You have penny pinchers that see better performance for less money on the gaming cards and fail to notice just how much corners they cut. I had some randomly hang after eight hours of constant use, a known issue that affects nobody using gaming cards as intended.
Worse I have coworkers who try to sell customers on gaming cards since they can't be bothered to optimize their shaders and the performance difference between those cards is nontrivial. I hope that puts a stop to that.
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If you've never had a gaming session last over 8 hours, you're not much of a gamer. Those days are long behind me, but I still remember them.
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8 hours? Yeah, I haven't done that since.. hmm. Yesterday.
My record is 56 hours, online gaming without missing a single match, matches last 5-30 minutes, you always survive the first five minutes and I had to go find food when knocked out early. Sleep? Nah.
University was fun ;)
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I had some randomly hang after eight hours of constant use, a known issue that affects nobody using gaming cards
You don't play games do you. 8 hours? Good that's the warm-up, when does the real gaming start? That's to say nothing of the time my sister and I tag teamed on the one PC because we couldn't be bothered lugging 2 to the event. She showed up with a sleeping bag and "relieved me" from my gaming duties, I returned the favour the following morning after getting back from the Maccas drive through with 6 bacon and egg McMuffins.
I'm pretty sure us eating those muffins for 5 minutes and a 30 second piss was the onl
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Some people will gamble that the gaming cards will perform adequately for 24/7 number-crunching, even though they aren't guaranteed to do so. Just like some people overclock CPUs and take their chances.
It's called differentiated marketing -- the "good, better, best" of selling. Manufacturers offer their products in several tiers and at several price-points, with different guarantees of performance to justify the prices.
Sometimes they run out of "good" or "better" and have to sell "best" in its place, withou
Re: This is really an attempt at legal evil genius (Score:3)
More likely this is a push for more revenue. Is there something which workstation cards require that consumer level cards do not, which requires a greater investment from NVidia. A reason to charge more for workstation/datacenter cards as it were. Why such a drastic difference in price between SKUs?
Datacenter include cryptocurrency mining ? (Score:2)
Re: This is really an attempt at legal evil geniu (Score:3)
The Tesla's have better and more double precision cores, larger ECC memory and ECC caches, thermally optimized for having 4 of them in 1U servers vs a single card in a desktop.
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No, they really are trying to squeeze people for money, not protect themselves. They've been moving in this direction for a few years, and this is just the latest step. They already had cracked down on pretty much all the companies that install pre-built clusters. None of them have been able to sell clusters with GeForce cards for a couple of years, because NVIDIA wouldn't let them. If you wanted a cluster with GeForce, you had to buy individual servers, set up the cluster yourself, buy the GPUs at reta
It's the old "who owns your hardware" story again. (Score:5, Interesting)
History repeats itself, did you ever remember the stories about Microsoft and Xbox? Apple and the iPhone? The right to modify your own hardware device?
The consumers and the companies that produced these product - couldn't quite agree on the ownership, even though it should be blatantly clear: If you OWN the hardware you purchase, you're technically free to do what it as you wish (in a perfect world free from lobbyist that convince lawmakers to follow the way of the companies rather than the public wishes).
Now, that said - the companies in turn, has no specific responsibility to offer you free software that support certain functions for your own purposes if they don't wish to do so, you may own the hardware, but you don't have rights to demand them to do anything for you in the future with your hardware (unless promised by them).
Nor do they have any obligation to provide you or anyone with full documentation on how your hardware works.
You in turn - have the full rights to refuse their products, you simply don't buy them.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
If I understand it right, you can still do whatever you want with the hardware itself, the restriction is on the drivers (software). That is why it does not apply to those who do not update the drivers. Nor if you use GeForce GPUs on Linux with the Nouveau drivers, but in practice switching to AMD is probably a better alternative.
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If I understand it right, you can still do whatever you want with the hardware itself, the restriction is on the drivers (software). That is why it does not apply to those who do not update the drivers.
I'm afraid it's not quite that simple. Ever heard of "rooting"? It simply means bypassing and editing the BIOS (which technically is also software) to your own liking, this often means bypassing access to hardware. This was the case for the longest time for those who wanted to use the powerful multi-core processors of the old Playstation 3.
These companies, don't want you to use your hardware for other purposes than they intended - as long as it competes with their own alternate products, never-mind the comp
Re:It's the old "who owns your hardware" story aga (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think this is relevant to GP's argumentation. He (she?) wrote that those who do not update the drivers don't need to agree to the new license. No rooting is necessary here. Legally, it means that the desire of Nvidia to control the use of their hardware can be avoided. At least in the short term.
Practically, the problem will resurface when the current hardware is obsolete/gets unreliable because of age and needs replacing, including drivers for the new hardware. Then the license terms won't be so easily avoided anymore.
Time to switch to AMD. Not only don't they have such clauses, they are actively putting themselves into a situation where a future management cannot easily pull a Nvidia anymore. I mean the open source driver development that gradually replaces the closed source drivers at AMD. Those licenses not be revoked for already released versions.
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Time to switch to AMD. Not only don't they have such clauses, they are actively putting themselves into a situation where a future management cannot easily pull a Nvidia anymore.
The only danger is that if AMD is depriving themselves of a significant revenue stream, then that makes Nvidia the richer company, possibly allowing it to hire the best programmers, built better facilities, do more R&D, and eventually kill AMD, in which case we're all poorer for AMD's customer-centric move.
Now, I don't think the
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Apple has never tried legal restrictions on where hardware could be used. To this day, data centers will have racks of Mac minis, if they have clients who need them.
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Apple's license famously has a 'cannot be used to design weapons' clause.
Oh really? [youtube.com]
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If you OWN the hardware you purchase, you're technically free to do what it as you wish
Indeed, but to do so you will need to write your own driver. The license restrictions has nothing at all to do with your hardware.
Good for open source drivers? (Score:3)
I may be overly optimistic but I hope that this move will provide enough incentive for big corporations to get behind open source drivers and help create something that's on par with the official ones.
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Murphy was an optimist.
Just say'in.
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I may be overly optimistic but I hope that this move will provide enough incentive for big corporations to get behind open source drivers and help create something that's on par with the official ones.
Drivers!?
Hell, I'm now cheering for the Chinese to start flooding the market with cheap nvidia GPU clones and drive nvidia out of business, or at least make them happy to sell anyone their products to do anything at all, as long as they're making the sale and not the Chinese.
Strat
What is a "datacenter" exactly? (Score:2)
If the topic comes up, I'll just mention that I keep all of my rack mounted "systems" (not gonna call them servers) in a 5000 square foot "storage closet" that just happens to have redundant UPS and cooling systems in it. How fortunate for me!
This seems like a pretty easy legal loophole to get around. If that doesn't work, I can say that I just used them for crypto mining since they already have a loophole for that.
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Yeah... no. A half competent lawyer will shoot that down before you even finish submitting it to the court, if it ever came to a trial. You can't call a gun a pillow and tell a judge you just had a 'pillow' fight, not a shoot out.
If it did come to some sort of investigation, they'd demand logs to your equipment to see what it's being used for. If you run any kind of closed source software there's a company that does audits for compliance (Business Software Alliance) and they have been known to show up wi
Other friendly provisions in Nvidia's license (Score:3)
No Warranties.To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the software is provided "As is" and nvidia and its suppliers disclaim all warranties of any kind or nature, whether express, implied, or statutory, relating to or arising from the software, including, but not limited to, implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement.
Governing Law. This LICENSE shall be deemed to have been made in, and shall be construed pursuant to, the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to or application of its conflict of laws rules or principles. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods is specifically disclaimed.
Re: (Score:3)
That sort of thing is present in the license agreement for just about every piece of commercial software, at least as far back as Windows 3.1 (the earliest one I read).
Actually, every open source and free-as-in-speech license has something like the second provision, and most if not all copyleft licenses have something like the first provision (the automatic termination part, not necessarily the "destroy all copies" part.)
Yeah, good luck with that . . . (Score:5, Informative)
ATI / AMD wins again!! (Score:5, Insightful)
ATI / AMD wins again!!
As they are open sourcing the ati video drivers in full for Linux.
data center (Score:2, Insightful)
They already fail in VMs (Score:5, Informative)
I recently tried to add an nvidia card to my workstation for a virtual machine, and it turned out that nvidia breaks the driver when they detect the card is in a virtual machine.
Specifically you get an unexplained "Code 43" error, and nvidia's excuse is that there is a bug which they will not fix. However if you spent some time to hide the VM, like removing hypervisor drivers, it would have magically worked. Unlucky as I am, it turns out nvidia also broke that workaround (at least it did not work for me).
There are 3rd party patchers for this thing: https://github.com/sk1080/nvid... [github.com] which require a lot of involvement, and will probably break at the next update. Given so much effort by nvidia to make sure I would be unable to use the hardware I purchased, I gave up, and removed the nvidia card from the workstation.
How would they even know? (Score:3)
The solution is ... (Score:2)
... a competitor with better terms of use.
The market needs to spank Nvidia.
Change the "Data Center" ... (Score:2)
... sign to "Game Room."
Too Many Warranty Claims? (Score:4, Insightful)
What are the odds that the warranty claims on these cards skyrocketed when they started getting used 24/7 in DC applications and caused this to get thrown in? They know miners won't buy cards that are inefficient for their purposes, and that money train is far too good to throw away, but wealthy corporations and universities? Pay up.
Passing on Nvidia Next Time! (Score:5, Insightful)
Is if fair for a brick-maker to forbid you from using one for a doorstop?
Security Concerns (Score:2)
That's possible. That might also have been the reason for Sony to eliminate the PS3 'Other OS' function. Too many cheap and powerful devices were being clustered together in third world countries and used for who-knows-what. The US Gov't contacts them (or Nvidia) and threatens unmentionable retribution unless they keep these out of the hands of Iran, the Norks or whoever.
Nvidia isn't the only game in town (Score:5, Insightful)
AMD and Intel make parallel computing hardware add-ons as well, plus a bunch of little guys. Lesson to be drawn: don't code your stuff in CUDA, use OpenCL so that it is portable to other hardware in case any one vendor gets to big for his britches.
Re:Nvidia isn't the only game in town (Score:4, Interesting)
What market? There are no competitors.
AMD doesn't have anything that can run Cuda. Also, they do not support the latest opencl so it's a no go for developers as Nvidia owns too much of the market to ignore.
My room mate is a graphics developer. He told me AMD is shit because it doesn't support CUDA. His employer forces it's customers to only support Nvidia as their is no one else on the market.
AMDs days are numbered like Unix was in the Windows outslaught. Developers still wrote visual basic apps, ActiveX, and IE 6 sites and ignored everything else. Customers didn't care.
Welp. (Score:3, Insightful)
You have no right to the success of the business m (Score:2)
If you sell $5 buckets for carrying water and *the same* buckets for $50 with a couple of minor tweaks for carrying wine, donâ(TM)t be surprised when people buy the $5 buckets and decide they theyâ(TM)re good enough to carry wine.
This points to either an artificial cross-market restriction (i.e. antitrust) or a wide open opportunity for competition. CUDA and CuDNN represents a substantial hurdle, though. Still, OpenCL *is* in early stages in some deep learning libraries. Hereâ(TM)s hoping
Re: (Score:2)
Corporate derangement syndrome strikes again (Score:4, Interesting)
A group of managers surrounded by yes-men/women convinced themselves that an obviously ridiculous thing would fly, or can be even be explained away as being for customers' own benefit. Plenty of engineers said "that's retarded" on internal mailing lists. Nobody listened to them and a company lawyer told them to drop the thread. Expect some weeks of denial and PR attempts followed by inevitable caving in with "it's only a guideline". I have not seen this particular train wreck from inside, but they are all the same.
What is a "Datacenter" anyways? (Score:2)
The first thing that jumps into my mind is rows and rows of rackmounted servers - hosting either databases, websites, or virtual machines. And the rackmounted chassis that I have looked at (admittedly on the old side) don't have a power supply capable of supplying the juice required for many of the modern GTX video cards, and it isn't obvious to me that the fans in the case are capable of removing all of the heat that these types of video cards generate.
That isn't to say that it can't be done of course - t
Re: Seems pretty simple to me (Score:2)
Re: Seems pretty simple to me (Score:5, Insightful)
"WHQL certified drivers are deployed automatically via Windows Update." -- And if you're running an OS that allows MS to automatically update your server, you deserve everything you get.
workstation users likely are on the full drivers a (Score:2)
workstation users likely are on the full drivers and not the more basic WHQL ones.
Re: workstation users likely are on the full driv (Score:2)
Think again mate. Just ordered four new login servers for an HPC and they all have nVidia graphics cards in them for remote visualization of results using VirtualGL. They will be in a datacentre becuase where the hell else to you but a few thousand cores? Much easier than downloading say a couple hundred GB or even a TB of data to see your results, when there is a spiffy login node with oodles of RAM and much better graphics card than on your desktop. Our users really like this so much we are ditching the s
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"WHQL certified drivers are deployed automatically via Windows Update." -- And if you're running an OS that allows MS to automatically update your server, you deserve everything you get.
WHQL drivers do not require me to read or agree to a license agreement. If I can't read the agreement before agreeing to it, it becomes automatically void. There's case law that backs up that effect.
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What kind of shit DC allows Windows Update? Are you running Home edition on a server?
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Not a lot of context here for "Windows," is there?
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Agreed. Even if you ask the janitor or your kid to click the install button, you're technically in the clear.
Re: Seems pretty simple to me (Score:5, Funny)
However, in order not to infringe the janitor's human rights, you might wish to employ a team of cats trained in keyboard skills. (check Youtube for details).
In a cat vs Nvidia lawsuit, I would expect that cat to land on its feet.
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noice
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I never asked Windows to update, and it installs the drivers without any user input. therefor I DIDN'T agree to anything. The person/entity you are looking to sue would be Microsoft for forcing me into breaking your contract rules.
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I never asked Windows to update, and it installs the drivers without any user input. therefor I DIDN'T agree to anything. The person/entity you are looking to sue would be Microsoft for forcing me into breaking your contract rules.
Many EULAs have clauses that read something like this:
- the software and/or EULA may be modified from time to time;
- your continued use of the software after such modifications indicates your agreement to the new terms;
- if you disagree with the terms, you must cease use of the software, blah blah blah; and
- certain clauses in the EULA survive after you cease use of the software.
IANAL. but my basic understanding is that you agree to conditions as they are now and in the future, and if you don't like it, you
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I also am not a lawyer, but I do believe those are the clauses that normally don't hold up in court.
Unfortunately we will not know until it goes to a court. Will be interesting to see the results when it does happen, I am fairly certain it will happen at some point. There is a reason they are doing this. Someone somewhere is overstepping bounds, the question is who.
Re: Seems pretty simple to me (Score:2)
The recourse would be to prevent the drivers from working with server operating systems, and only work with the desktop version.
Re:Something to hide ... (Score:5, Informative)
It's about pricing.
For roughly equivalent GeForce versus Quadro/Tesla, nVidia charges an arm and a leg more for the professional model. They have long been forbidding their partners from selling 'professional' (workstation/server) products and allowing to order GeForce with them.
Particularly this has been a sore spot for academia, where they always want the cheaper GeForce model and they inexplicably can't get it.. I work at a vendor and customers always assume it is us being rent seeking assholes. I'm happy nVidia is making it very clear they are the ones being assholes, not us.
May bite them in the ass, especially in academia (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless an organization is already heavily invested in CUDA, they might go with OpenCL instead so they can use AMD consumer stuff instead of Quadros. Even where GeForce versus AMD Vega currently favors GeForce, Quadro prices will make sure that GeForce versus Vega turns that into a win for AMD in terms of investment costs.
In academia, that would also lead to the effect that new developers are more often trained on OpenCL and less on CUDA. That could lead to the sort of long-term win Microsoft Visual Studio had over the Borland development tools.
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In cluster environments, the NVidia products are well ahead of anything made by AMD. And a good portion of the other core components (management, scheduler, ...) are already built to support NVidia hardware (with NVML/SMI/...).
Some of the Intel accelerators might get close but are also pretty pricey.
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Matrox used to be the good one for this. They didn't make that distinction and as a result the Parhelia retained a lot of its value for a long time, despite the fact that it was never that impressive a card in the first place.
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Also, due to the form fractor, the GTX 1080s won't fit in a blade-type server. We have to buy a thicker desktop-style machine and fit it into the rack sideways, where it takes up more height than we'd like.
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They're specifically stating that they do allow usage for mining.
Re: Something to hide ... (Score:2)
I think there were some specific features of the Quadro which at the minimum requires the Quadro driver and firmware to unlock, IF the hardware was present in the Geforce line.
Otherwise the Quadro drivers were crappy for gaming, most users noticed a significant increase in frame rates when using Geforce drivers on a Quadro card.
I suspect a bigger part of t
Re: Something to hide ... (Score:2)
The drivers are optimized for different applications. Quadros also tend to be packaged smaller and less noisy or even passive cooled than Geforces.
The Quadro can also virtualize itself so you can have a number of accelerated remote desktops with a single card. Depending on the Quadro line they also have different numbers of single/double precision cores.
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I bet the virtualization is all in the driver anyway.
Out of stock locally (Score:2)
Some kind of bug that only affects 24/7 usage of the software or hardware (temperature reliability issues)?
It might involve the pricing and shortages of NVIDIA GPUs in the consumer market? Locally GTX 1060 and above are out of stock, 1050s are heading that way.
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No the shortages are from fucking idiots who think they can mine their way to retirement.
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Will the ASIC run Plunkbat at 1440p with full AA and all settings set to max and still give me 60fps?
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There are quite a few cases where you need access to the massive parallelism of a graphics card and don't care about the actual graphics part, and integrated graphics give less value for money. Render farms, machine learning, certain types of modeling (e.g. weather), etc.
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Likely because NVIDIA hired a bunch of lawyers to work through the issues. As opposed to random Slashdot posters. Now, that doesn't mean that somebody ELSE's lawyers (or your own, should you be so inclined) can't tussle with the hired guns.
But one can say with some assurance that this isn't something that can be dismissed out of hand.
Re: Seriously??? (Score:2)
Re: Why are computers different than cars or coffe (Score:2)
There are glassware agreements for bars and try off-roading your hatchback and get warranties honored.
Re: Why are computers different than cars or coffe (Score:3)
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Companies don't and shouldn't have dictatorial powers over things they have sold.
Software isn't sold. It is licensed.