<story><title>NVidia will license their GPU cores to other hardware manufacturers</title><url>http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2013/06/18/visual-computings-ascent-gives-nvidia-room-to-expand-its-business-model/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mtgx</author><text>This is the right strategy for Nvidia, especially in the mobile space, considering they&amp;#x27;ll also be the only ones with the full OpenGL 4.3 support, which means that if Kepler GPU&amp;#x27;s are popular, developers will be making some pretty amazing &lt;i&gt;mobile&lt;/i&gt; games that will only be available on Kepler GPU&amp;#x27;s because they&amp;#x27;ll be the only ones to have OpenGL 4.3 for years to come.&lt;p&gt;I only wish this was Maxwell coming out next year, not Kepler, which was supposed to be in Tegra 4, but you know Nvidia and their delays...I also hope they don&amp;#x27;t screw this up by making the GPU very inefficient. If they do that, no one will want it, so this strategy will be irrelevant. They say it&amp;#x27;s very efficient, but over the years I&amp;#x27;ve become a lot more skeptical about stuff Nvidia claims, at least in the mobile space.&lt;p&gt;If they can convince Samsung to use Kepler for Exynos 6, or Maxwell for Exynos 7, that would be a huge win for them. Samsung has been a little lost lately in terms of what GPU&amp;#x27;s to use in Exynos SoC&amp;#x27;s, so this may be Nvidia&amp;#x27;s window of opportunity, if they can prove their GPU is the best.</text></comment>
<story><title>NVidia will license their GPU cores to other hardware manufacturers</title><url>http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2013/06/18/visual-computings-ascent-gives-nvidia-room-to-expand-its-business-model/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sho_hn</author><text>I wonder what this will mean for free drivers.&lt;p&gt;While nVidia hasn&amp;#x27;t been entirely uncooperative (they do participate in X.org upstream development to the degree that it affects their products), the only free driver they&amp;#x27;ve written for the line of GPUs the to-be-licensed Kepler core is part of is an obfuscated, 2D-only token effort, and they have stayed away from participating in the Nouveau project to write a fully-featured free driver. Contrast that with Intel and AMD, where the free driver is the primary effort or one supported with documentation, code and manpower, respectively.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, they&amp;#x27;ve contracted Avionic Design to write a free 3D-enabled driver for the GPUs in their Tegra 3 SoCs. If future Tegra is based on a Kepler derivative (as indicated by the blog), and this prior commitment forces them to release a free driver for it as well, I wonder if one day this hypothetical free driver might have a shot at replacing their closed source codebase. Or they could join forces with Nouveau and finally put some of their resources behind it, similar to what AMD has done.</text></comment>