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Nvidia Wants To Prohibit Consumer GPU Use In Datacenters (theregister.co.uk)
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."
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.
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... 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.