It's simply a function of their history. They used to have high priced professional level graphics cards ("Nvidia Quadro") using exactly the same chips as their consumer graphics cards.
The BIOS of the cards was different, enabling different features. So people wanting those features cheaply would buy the consumer graphics cards and flash the matching Quadro BIOS to them. Worked perfectly fine.
Nvidia naturally wasn't happy about those "lost sales", so began a game of whack-a-mole to stop BIOS flashing from working. They did stuff like adding resistors to the boards to tell the card whether it was a Geforce or Quadro card, and when that was promptly reverse engineered they started getting creative in other ways.
Meanwhile, they couldn't really Open Source their drivers because then people could see what the "Geforce vs Quadro" software checks were. That would open up software countermeasures being developed.
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In the most recent few years the professional cards and gaming cards now use different chips. So the BIOS tricks are no longer relevant.
Which means Nvidia can "safely" Open Source their drivers now, and they've begun doing so.
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Note that this is a copy of my comment from several months ago, as it's just as relevant now as it was then: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=38418278
I swore off ever again buying Nvidia, or any laptops that come with Nvidia, after all this. Maybe in 10 years they'll have managed to right the brand perceptions of people like myself.
but those companies are really adverse to open sourcing because they can't be sure they own all the code. it's decades of copy pasting reference implementations after all
No. H20 is a different chip designed to be less compute-dense (by having different combinations of SM/L2$/HBM controller). It is not a throttled chip.
A800 and H800 are A100/H100 with some area of the chip physically blown up and reconfigured. They are also not simply throttled.
> there's a reason why h800 were included last minute
No. Oct 22 restrictions are by itself significantly easier than Oct 23 one. NVIDIA just need to kill 4 NVLink lanes off A100 and you get A800. For H100 you kill some more NVLink until on paper NVLink bandwidth is roughly at A800 level again and then voila.
BIS is certainly pissed off by NVIDIA's attempt at being creative to sell the best possible product to China. So they actually lowered allowed compute number AGAIN in Oct 23. That's what killed H800.
The meat of the drivers is still proprietary, this just allows them to be loaded without a proprietary kernel module.
So my guess is it's to do with LLMs. They are all in on AI, and having more of their code be part of training sets could make tools like ChatGPT/Claude/Copilot better at generating code for Nvidia GPUs.
The best solution is to have the industry eat their dogfood.
A bit sad, but hey, welcome anyways.
What really changed the situation is that Turing architecture GPUs bring new, more powerful management CPU, which has enough capacity to essentially run the OS-agnostic parts of driver that used to be provided as blob on linux.
"Open Drivers" from nVidia include different firmware that utilizes the new-found performance.
I don't know if that's what's happening here, honestly, but you're right that they don't care about being shamed, but building a reputation of being hard to work with and target, especially in a growing market like Linux (still tiny, but growing nonetheless, and becoming significantly more important in the areas where non-gaming GPU use is concerned) can start to erode sales and B2B relationships, and the latter particularly if you make the programmers and PMs hate using your products.
What competition?
I do agree that companies don’t really care for public sentiment as long as business is going as usual. Nvidia is printing money with their data center hardware [1] where half of their yearly revenue comes from.
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...
Isn't Linux 80% of their market? ML et al is 80% of their sales, and ~99% of that is Linux.
Re-reading that story is kind of wild. I don't know how valuable what they allegedly got would be (silicon, graphics and chipset files) but the hackers accused Nvidia of 'hacking back' and encrypting their data.
Reminds me of a story I heard about Nvidia hiring a private military to guard their cards after entire shipments started getting 'lost' somewhere in asia.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/no-half-a-million-geforce-rtx-30-ser...
[1] https://www.geeknetic.es/Noticia/20794/Encuentran-en-Corea-5...
[0] https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/nvidia-hackers-allegedly-...