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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."
With policies like that, Oracle will be proud to buy them!
...just because you plaster something in a license doesn't make it automatically law.
Fuck you, Nvidia.
WHQL certified drivers are deployed automatically via Windows Update.
SO, if it's automatic, you don't agree to new policies. IMHO, you are fine !
"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.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Agreed. Even if you ask the janitor or your kid to click the install button, you're technically in the clear.
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.
before it expires (or NVIDIA asks Google to clear it): here
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.
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.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
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.
That's why there is a Windows 10 LTSB branch, not all customers are willing to take automated feature updates. I'm not sure about the handling of security hotfixes though, a quick skimming of some articles I found via Google did not yield specifics about automatic or manual security patches.
Otherwise I agree, anyone who uses a non-LTSB version of Windows 10 for critical stuff has it coming...
C - the footgun of programming languages
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.
This would never be allowed on other products. 2 examples.
At brunch the other day I ordered hot chocolate. They served it in a coffee cup. Imagine if the cup maker sued insisting they buy his hot cocoa mugs?
My sister needed some tools for her garden At her new home, she folded down the seats of her hatchback to fit the rakes and shovels in the car. What if GM had stopped that because she wasnâ(TM)t using a pickup?
Both of these examples are absurd but no more absurd than nvidia restricting cards like this.
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.
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.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The world doesn't work that way. Companies don't and shouldn't have dictatorial powers over things they have sold.
Doesn't stop them from trying though.
This LICENSE will automatically terminate if Customer fails to comply with any of the terms and conditions hereof. In such event, Customer must destroy all copies of the SOFTWARE and all of its component parts.
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.
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 competition...
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Enforcement of this will be pretty much impossible without some tie-in to the OS or drivers. First of all, what's a datacenter? Cloud-based infrastructure, or a room of servers only running internally on a local network? How about a mining operation in someone's basement? A grad student running a small network of GPUs for some sort of academic research? Etc. Now, if they really want to enforce it, it can be done -- you'd have to tie the software and drivers to server-class platforms that people typically have to pay for. E.g., I've seen Chelsio do that with some of their iWarp NICs where iWarp is disabled on anything but Windows 10 Enterprise and the Microsoft server OSes (though in that case, Chelsio claimed that Microsoft forced them to do it). On the Linux side, that might not be a realistic option.
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.
C - the footgun of programming languages
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.
ATI / AMD wins again!!
As they are open sourcing the ati video drivers in full for Linux.
workstation users likely are on the full drivers and not the more basic WHQL ones.
noice
LTSB *does* automated feature updates - they are just less frequent, and you can postpone them for 30 days, but when they want to happen, they do it the same way as on any Windows 10 version... Also:
Otherwise I agree, anyone who uses Windows 10 for critical stuff has it coming...
FTFY
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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe Systems, and Nvidia executives are trying to see who can be most abusive?
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.
They're specifically stating that they do allow usage for mining.
Very strange move given the situation. Insanity of the supplier is a good reason to look for another one. AMD RX Vega is equal in price/performance of "consumer" hardware at moment. For CG at least.
"Datacenter Editions" of Windows is more a licensing thing than an OS difference. What I know about it so far, is that the Datacenter license is about Virtual Machine licensing. You license the host, and however many cores it has, and run as many VMs of essentially whatever Microsoft OS you want.
The recourse would be to prevent the drivers from working with server operating systems, and only work with the desktop version.
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.
C - the footgun of programming languages
How is data center defined? I dont have a data center, I have a lab! I dont have a data center, I have a computer room. I dont have a data center I have a mind your own dam business room. Even if in a license I find it hard to see where they can stop the use of a product that has been purchased.
Rednecks around here buy $3,000 gaming rigs, and literally throw them away when they get a virus.
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.
What kind of shit DC allows Windows Update? Are you running Home edition on a server?
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.
If I purchase a piece of hardware, I plan to use it for anything I damned well please, as long as it is not in violation of any laws. And, NVIDIA telling me that I can't use part of the hardware in my data center is not a law. It's like a car manufacturer telling a small business that it can't use a small SUV to make deliveries, and that it has to purchase a more expensive delivery truck for that work. It's nonsense.
How do they intend to enforce this? Get your IP address from the driver, match it up against known blocks assigned to hosting companies? It's not like they can say "Oh, this is a Dell R740, the driver won't install" because that thing could be sitting (loudly) on a table in my house, not necessarily racked in a data center. It's one thing to say "We want you to buy our Quadro/Tesla gear for your giant virtualized environment" but another to say I can't pop a 1080 Ti in the one server that needs GPU horsepower for some task. It's asinine.
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.
... a competitor with better terms of use.
The market needs to spank Nvidia.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Not a lot of context here for "Windows," is there?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
... sign to "Game Room."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Has anyone ever seen any evidence about the difference between Quadro and GeForce? I’ve read through all of the white papers describing the “differences” between a Quadro and a GeForce card [1]. Approaching it as a skeptic, this paper seems written by the Quadro marketing team. Most of the claims made about the quadro are also true about the geforce - for example, just the first one says that the quadro supports anti-aliasing in hardware, but then so does geforce. Consider the Quadro P4000, retailing for $799 vs. the 1080ti at $749 Architecture: both are pascal chips Clock rates: titan is 1536MHz, pascal is 1202MHz Memory width: titan is 352-bit, pascal is 256-bit Memory Bw: titan is 484MBps, pascal is 243MBps CUDA cores: titan 3584 cores, pascal is 1792 cores Both support G-sync, directX 12, Vulkan API, OpenGL 4.5 ,.
Both support up to 4 displays, both support 4K and 5K displays.
I've even looked at rendered images side by side and I cannot see any difference ... the only thing I can tell is that its a different profit center for nVidia.
[1] www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_geforce.html
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.
You don't get to sell me a product, then dictate how I will use it unless there is a safety issue, then maybe.
You can't sell me a TV then tell me it can only be used in the living room.
You can't sell me a bicycle, then tell me I can only ride it on Wednesdays.
You don't want folks buying the cheaper hardware ? Make your professional grade stuff woth upgrading to instead of reusing the same hardware and ' unlocking ' it with software.
The world is fully aware of Nvidias bullshit which is why they go with the non-pro gear. Why the hell would we spend 3x the price when all they do is change the drivers ?
Datacenter might include a cryptocurrency mining farm?
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.
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 revenues in this situation are are actually significant enough to matter, but if I'm wrong, AMD may have attached an anvil to its future success. The ability to price discriminate by market segment is critical to the survival of a *lot* of businesses.
In the end, I will not buy a scumbag's product.
Is if fair for a brick-maker to forbid you from using one for a doorstop?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
The old drivers still have total BS stuff wrapped into them
Want to encode more than one thing on a card, even though the hardware can do 10x the job,, buy a pro priced card.
Want to use more than 1 GPU to do encoding, even though you have 3 of them, maybe 1 per card? nope, driver disabled, buy a pro priced card
That is because you are ignorant of your rights and believe that somehow if a Corp puts it in the EULA somehow it trumps all of case law, jurisprudence, and the basics of contract law that have existed for centuries.
itâ(TM)s a impeachment of our education system inability to teach critical thinking skills.
And Itâ(TM)s sad you think this way because I bet any official line you will just accept and justify since you donâ(TM)t know any better.
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
Capitalism is funny that way.
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.
Some users have flashed the cards with firmware from the other line, and seen little difference. There are a lot more similarities than differences.
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 the issue is licensing. NVidia probably has to license code or patents for workstation/datacenter GPUs.
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
There are glassware agreements for bars and try off-roading your hatchback and get warranties honored.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Any company that tries to dictate what you can do with a piece of hardware after you paid for it and own it needs to be taught a lesson.
This is outrageous. Boycott Nvidia products until this changes. Ensure all your associates including purchasing managers are made aware of this boycott.
Unbelievable. The clown ultimately responsible for adding the language should be fired, shunned and shamed publicly for the piece of garbage he or she is.
Companies don't and shouldn't have dictatorial powers over things they have sold.
Software isn't sold. It is licensed.
RMS was right. Again.
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.
Apple's license famously has a 'cannot be used to design weapons' clause.
Good-bye
The word you're looking for is "indictment", not "impeachment".
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 it gets to parity (or close enough) to stop these sorts of abuses.
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 separate login and visualization nodes and just making all the login nodes visualization nodes. Perhaps before opening your mouth next time you might want to check with someone with actual experience of actual data centres, rather than your notions of what a data centre should be. Oh and workstations in data centres is really big in the city too, but what would you know.
Define datacenter. My server room in my basement? My server room in my corporation? My server building at my hosting company? All of them have some form of local on-site office with people and workstations.
This is probably the biggest crock of shit since I don't know when. Sheer lunacy.
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.
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, your only option is to stop using the product.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Its apple, that is more a friendly warning into one of their many limitations :-)
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.
Microsoft Is Filled With Abusive Managers And Overworked Employees, Says Tell-All Book
Embrace, extend, and extinguish "... 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 spyware ever made.
Windows 10 shows you ads while you are trying to work. But, at least at present, you may be able to stop at least some of the advertising: 7 ways Windows 10 pushes ads at you, and how to stop them.
Unless NVidiay make hardware specs available so that other vendors can make software for the card, I think you would have a very strong argument that their software is an intrinsic part of the hardware and should be able to be subject to the same rules as use of the hardware is, since the hardware can not work without it.
Otherwise you could also say that the microcode on any general purpose CPU of any kind is also likewise licensed and able to be restricted in the same way.
If GM can't prevent you buying a car and using it anywhere because of a software license on the microcode of the car's engine control unit, then NVidia should likewise not be allowed to restrict use of their cards in this way, based on a software license for software that is a necessary part of the card's use, for which there is no alternative. Wish I was a lawyer.
"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.
NOTE: I despise Nvidia due to past personal experiences dealing with them and won't have an Nvidia product in my house. BUT, this seems aimed at liability though I think they would be better of simply stating it isn't supported rather than implementing it in software, the reality is gaming cards are not designed for running in data centre scenarios, this reveals a lot of bugs and problems that just don't exist when using them for gaming and rather than be on the hook for fixing those problems the easiest solution is to say this product is not made for that scenario. That $5 bucket they sold you might work ok for water but it leaks has cracks in it and the handle is likely to fall off if you fill it to the top and carry for too long, doesn't really matter for water, but when it is your vintage wine the owners are going to start screaming when thousands of dollars just went down the gurgler.
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.
Apple's license famously has a 'cannot be used to design weapons' clause.
Oh really?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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 - there are ways to satisfy the power requirements for people who really want to go down this road. Getting the heat removed could be a different matter however.
The blockchain exception is an odd one - what difference does that really make what type of work they are doing?
I bet the virtualization is all in the driver anyway.
I don't know how AMD structures their EULAs, but they also have a line of professional cards, distinct from their consumer cards (and more expensive).
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.
Wait until we get to cashless societies. Banks will start changing terms and conditions on a regular basis and sieze your (their) money if they feel you've breached some obscure thing. And there won't be a thing you can do about it.
WHQL certified drivers are deployed automatically via Windows Update.
Didn't get the memo? Windows has nothing to do with the HPC crowd these days.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Likely because NVIDIA hired a bunch of lawyers to work through the issues.
I'd love to see NVidia hire more lawyers. It's the beginning of the end when a company ends up run by lawyers like IBM in the 70's or Microsoft in the 90's, in both cases the inflection pointer where they lost control of their industries.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
If Nvidia stands their ground on this then it's not too hard to image some of the affected companies wrapping their own drivers or even jumping on the nouveau project despite Nvidia.
NVIDIA's partner vendors really hate NVIDIA over this. For the past 18 months they have been trying to force partners who provide systems for machine learning and general compute to not even mention GeForce. The thing is everyone knows that GeForce cards are nearly as reliable as Tesla and provide the same performance. A 1080Ti for $700 is only about 10-20% slower than a Tesla V100 at ~$8000. (and that's comparing Pascal to Volta!) This is for real machine learning workloads. This is not a secret. Also, reliability of 9xx and 10xx series GeForce cards is excellent (know from thousands of cards deployed ... can't say more)
This whole thing is just NVIDIA being greedy and evil. They have a monopoly on GPU compute because of the (excellent) CUDA development ecosystem. It's a shame that the open source community has built all of their machine learning frameworks around proprietary software. [as always RMS was right!] There is some hope with the AMD ROCm stuff but it's going to take a big open source community effort to get any of that working well.
I really hate this because I'm forced to go along with NVIDIA for practical reasons but I feel real dirty
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.
The
The ban only applies to the nVidia software that runs the hardware, and not to their hardware itself. Hardware is protected by the first sale doctrine (in the US at least) so nVidia can't control that. So people are free to write their own software to run nVidia GPUs in the data centre. Of course nVidia doesn't make doing that easy. The legal issues around that are similar to those addressed by "right to repair" legislation in other industries.
Of course gun makers want their guns to be used to kill people. Gun murders increase gun sales.
No NVidia Licensing issues anyway, and AMD since opening up its drivers are more reliable now on all platforms as many more engineers are working on drivers in the OpenGL area than Nividia is on Direct X.
One example is games and I found worked surprising well with WINE now, and I was able to dump my Windows Guest with VFIO to run FAF.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Can't make up and enforce terms once money has exchanged hands. Otherwise every used car dealer could put a sticker over the ignition stating that you have to get your oil changed with them every 1,000 miles at $100 a pop.
An action like this is enough to prevent me from ever considering building another project atop CUDA. It's not that I plan on rolling out consumer grade hardware into the datacenter. It's the principal that they can suddenly and arbitrarily lock customers into terms they didn't agree to when they set out and committed to a platform. Fuck Nvidia. Seriously. Fuck them.
I used to work for the company making the EasyViz dicom/mint medical image reader used by many hospitals and image reading facilities, and apart from the workstation edition (everything in a desktop application) it requires "rendernodes" placed in a datacenter from where the images are streamed to a thin client. All these rendernodes are equipped with high-end consumer NVidia cards. EasyViz can use any NVidia card but absolutely everybody uses a consumer version due to cost.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Not if you disallow svchost.exe access to the internet :) ...until you want it to (if ever)
Unless there is an undisclosed Pentium-style floating point bug... Damn, they are using "Pentium" for other crap now. I miss the days when I didn't need to read a dozen product specification sheets to compare CPUs.
Car example:
I buy a car and CompanyX says I can't use it to transport bread. I still do and then suddenly they have a recall. They say I should sign that I can't transport bread or they won't install the system that could prevent me from dying in an accident.
And remember, just because you click OK at the AUP does not mean it is legal what they wrote. At least not in any normal country.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Not about pricing. Massive fallout is coming for Intel from Spectre and Meltdown; Nvidia are positioning themselves to cover their asses when bugs are found in their hardware and software, a la "we told you not to use these in server environments."
$5 for each "shit", $10 for a "SHIT", $10 for a vague reference about being a "graphics developer", and an extra $20 if posted by something other than Anonymous Coward. I guess selling your soul does have a price, but that $20 just couldn't get him there.
It is , the 760 cards you can change a resistor out that changes the card to report it is a Quadro, and magically all the Quadro functions work on a Geforce card.
Basically they are are underclocked geforce cards.
No they aren't, they run at the same speed as a GeForce.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Sounds like there's a business opportunity there:
"I might be able to salvage the case and maybe the power supply. Twenty bucks and a case of Bud? Sure, of course I can collect".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Just got to catch these guys before the garbage gets hauled off. My brother had a nice Voodoo back when Voodoo was a thing. Sold it as a used high end card to a prospective buyer. Dude threw the machine away and came in the shop wanting to buy another.