<story><title>Nvidia is reportedly in ‘advanced talks’ to buy ARM for more than $32B</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-31/nvidia-said-in-advanced-talks-to-buy-softbank-s-chip-company-arm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fluffything</author><text>&amp;gt; There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing&lt;p&gt;I always just assumed that interfacing proprietary IP with the GPL is a tricky legal business. One slip, and all your IP becomes open source.&lt;p&gt;Do you have a source explaining what licensing changes they would have to make and what impact would that have for Linux and Nvidia ? I&amp;#x27;d like to read that.</text></item><item><author>robert_foss</author><text>Speaking as a Linux graphics developer, I can confirm that NVidia indeed is a pretty terrible actor. There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing, NVidia knows this.&lt;p&gt;A NVidia purchase of ARM would also create a lot of conflicts of interest.</text></item><item><author>fluffything</author><text>You are not wrong, but the facts you have cherry picked fail to portrait the whole picture.&lt;p&gt;For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past.&lt;p&gt;The claim that Nintendo is the only company nvidia successfully collaborates with is just wrong:&lt;p&gt;- nvidia manufactures GPU chips, collaborates with dozens of OEMs to ship graphics cards&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborates with IBM which ships Power8,9,10 processors all with nvidia technology&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborates with OS vendors like microsoft very successfully&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborated with mellanox successfully and acquired it&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborates with ARM today...&lt;p&gt;The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well...&lt;p&gt;I mean, this is not nvidia specific.&lt;p&gt;You can take any big company, e.g., Apple, and paint a horrible case by cherry picking things (no Vulkan support on MacOSX forcing everyone to use Metal, they don&amp;#x27;t open source their C++ toolchain, etc.), yet Apple does many good things too (open sourced parts of their toolchain like LLVM, open source swift, etc.).&lt;p&gt;I mean, you even try to paint this as if Nvidia is the only company that Apple has parted ways with, yet Apple has long track record of parting ways with other companies (IBM PowerPC processors, Intel, ...). I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure that the moment Apple is able to produce a competitive GFX card, they will part ways with AMD as well.</text></item><item><author>DCKing</author><text>This is quite concerning honestly. I don&amp;#x27;t mind ARM being acquired, and I don&amp;#x27;t mind Nvidia acquiring things. But I&amp;#x27;m concerned about this combination.&lt;p&gt;Nvidia is a pretty hostile company to others in the market. They have a track record of vigorously pushing their market dominance and their own way of doing things. They view making custom designs as beneath them. Their custom console GPU designs - in the original Xbox, in the Playstation 3 - were considered a failure because of terrible cooporation with Nvidia [0]. Apple is probably more demanding than other PC builders and have completely fallen out with them. Nvidia has famously failed to cooporate with the Linux community on the standardized graphics stack supported by Intel and AMD and keeps pushing propietary stuff. There are more examples.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to not make &amp;quot;hostile&amp;quot; too much of a value judgement. Nvidia has been an extremely successful company &lt;i&gt;because of it&lt;/i&gt; too. It&amp;#x27;s alright if it&amp;#x27;s not in their corporate culture to work well with others. Clearly it&amp;#x27;s working, and Nvidia for all their faults is still innovating.&lt;p&gt;But this culture won&amp;#x27;t fly well if your core business is developing chip designs &lt;i&gt;for others&lt;/i&gt;. It&amp;#x27;s also a problem if you are the gatekeeper of a CPU instruction set that a metric ton of other infrastructure increasingly depends on. I really, really hope ARM&amp;#x27;s current business will be allowed to run independently as ARM knows how to do this and Nvidia has time and time again shown not to understand this at all. But I&amp;#x27;m pessimistic about that. I&amp;#x27;m afraid Nvidia will gut ARM the company, the ARM  architectures, and the ARM instruction set in the long run.&lt;p&gt;[0]: An interesting counterpoint would the Nintendo Switch running on an Nvidia Tegra hardware, but all the evidence points to that this chip is a 100% vanilla Nvidia Tegra X1 that Nvidia was already selling themselves (to the point its bootloader could be unlocked like a standard Tegra, leading to the Switch Fusee-Gelee exploit).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>monocasa</author><text>Nvidia has a very different model for what they&amp;#x27;re trying to get out of their drivers.  They spent something like 5x more on the number of driver developers than AMD, then would send engineers to work with AAA game studios to &amp;quot;optimize their games&amp;quot; for Nvidia.  Good so far.  But then these optimizations went so far as fixing (in the driver) broken game code.  Like apparently it was so bad that games were being shipped without issuing BeginScene&amp;#x2F;EndScene on DirectX.&lt;p&gt;Hence AMDs push for Mantle then Vulkan.  The console like API is the carrot to get people to use an API that has an verification layer so that third parties can easily say &amp;quot;wow what a broken game&amp;quot; rather &amp;quot;wow this new game runs on Nvidia and not AMD, what broken AMD drivers&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Nvidia open sourcing their drivers completely destroys a large chunk of their competitive advantage and is so intertwined with all the IP of the games they have hacks for that I&amp;#x27;d be surprised if they ever would want to open source them, or even could if they wanted to.&lt;p&gt;More docs would be nice though.</text></comment>
<story><title>Nvidia is reportedly in ‘advanced talks’ to buy ARM for more than $32B</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-31/nvidia-said-in-advanced-talks-to-buy-softbank-s-chip-company-arm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fluffything</author><text>&amp;gt; There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing&lt;p&gt;I always just assumed that interfacing proprietary IP with the GPL is a tricky legal business. One slip, and all your IP becomes open source.&lt;p&gt;Do you have a source explaining what licensing changes they would have to make and what impact would that have for Linux and Nvidia ? I&amp;#x27;d like to read that.</text></item><item><author>robert_foss</author><text>Speaking as a Linux graphics developer, I can confirm that NVidia indeed is a pretty terrible actor. There could be a viable Open Source driver for most of their GPUs tomorrow if they changed some licensing, NVidia knows this.&lt;p&gt;A NVidia purchase of ARM would also create a lot of conflicts of interest.</text></item><item><author>fluffything</author><text>You are not wrong, but the facts you have cherry picked fail to portrait the whole picture.&lt;p&gt;For example, you paint it as if Nvidia is the only company Apple has had problems with, yet Apple has parted ways with Intel, IBM (Power PCs), and many other companies in the past.&lt;p&gt;The claim that Nintendo is the only company nvidia successfully collaborates with is just wrong:&lt;p&gt;- nvidia manufactures GPU chips, collaborates with dozens of OEMs to ship graphics cards&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborates with IBM which ships Power8,9,10 processors all with nvidia technology&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborates with OS vendors like microsoft very successfully&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborated with mellanox successfully and acquired it&lt;p&gt;- nvidia collaborates with ARM today...&lt;p&gt;The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well...&lt;p&gt;I mean, this is not nvidia specific.&lt;p&gt;You can take any big company, e.g., Apple, and paint a horrible case by cherry picking things (no Vulkan support on MacOSX forcing everyone to use Metal, they don&amp;#x27;t open source their C++ toolchain, etc.), yet Apple does many good things too (open sourced parts of their toolchain like LLVM, open source swift, etc.).&lt;p&gt;I mean, you even try to paint this as if Nvidia is the only company that Apple has parted ways with, yet Apple has long track record of parting ways with other companies (IBM PowerPC processors, Intel, ...). I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure that the moment Apple is able to produce a competitive GFX card, they will part ways with AMD as well.</text></item><item><author>DCKing</author><text>This is quite concerning honestly. I don&amp;#x27;t mind ARM being acquired, and I don&amp;#x27;t mind Nvidia acquiring things. But I&amp;#x27;m concerned about this combination.&lt;p&gt;Nvidia is a pretty hostile company to others in the market. They have a track record of vigorously pushing their market dominance and their own way of doing things. They view making custom designs as beneath them. Their custom console GPU designs - in the original Xbox, in the Playstation 3 - were considered a failure because of terrible cooporation with Nvidia [0]. Apple is probably more demanding than other PC builders and have completely fallen out with them. Nvidia has famously failed to cooporate with the Linux community on the standardized graphics stack supported by Intel and AMD and keeps pushing propietary stuff. There are more examples.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to not make &amp;quot;hostile&amp;quot; too much of a value judgement. Nvidia has been an extremely successful company &lt;i&gt;because of it&lt;/i&gt; too. It&amp;#x27;s alright if it&amp;#x27;s not in their corporate culture to work well with others. Clearly it&amp;#x27;s working, and Nvidia for all their faults is still innovating.&lt;p&gt;But this culture won&amp;#x27;t fly well if your core business is developing chip designs &lt;i&gt;for others&lt;/i&gt;. It&amp;#x27;s also a problem if you are the gatekeeper of a CPU instruction set that a metric ton of other infrastructure increasingly depends on. I really, really hope ARM&amp;#x27;s current business will be allowed to run independently as ARM knows how to do this and Nvidia has time and time again shown not to understand this at all. But I&amp;#x27;m pessimistic about that. I&amp;#x27;m afraid Nvidia will gut ARM the company, the ARM  architectures, and the ARM instruction set in the long run.&lt;p&gt;[0]: An interesting counterpoint would the Nintendo Switch running on an Nvidia Tegra hardware, but all the evidence points to that this chip is a 100% vanilla Nvidia Tegra X1 that Nvidia was already selling themselves (to the point its bootloader could be unlocked like a standard Tegra, leading to the Switch Fusee-Gelee exploit).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mappu</author><text>Nouveau is a highly capable open source driver for NVIDIA GPUs based on reverse-engineering.&lt;p&gt;For some older card generations (e.g. GTX 600 series) it was competitive with the official driver. But in every hardware generation since then, the GPU requires signed firmware in order to run at any decent clock speed.&lt;p&gt;The necessary signed firmware is present inside the proprietary driver, but nouveau can&amp;#x27;t load it because it&amp;#x27;s against the ToS to redistribute it.&lt;p&gt;Most GPU features are available but run at 0.1x speed or slower because of this single reason. Nvidia could absolutely fix this &amp;quot;tomorrow&amp;quot; if they were motivated.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.phoronix.com&amp;#x2F;scan.php?page=news_item&amp;amp;px=Nouveau-Mesa-Volta-Turing-MR&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.phoronix.com&amp;#x2F;scan.php?page=news_item&amp;amp;px=Nouveau-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>