Posted on 06/29/2012 8:32:35 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
NVIDIA has lost an order of at least ten million graphics cards because their GeForce/Quadro driver is closed-source.
It's been a very interesting week in the binary Linux graphics world with Linus Torvalds calling NVIDIA the worst company ever along with making colorful comments about the green company, NVIDIA's bullshit response, and then on the opposite side of the table was XBMC developers publicly pointing out the problems with AMD Catalyst. Ending out Friday, assuming nothing else interesting takes place this weekend in the duopoly Linux graphics card battle, is word of NVIDIA losing a huge order due to their binary blob.
The Chinese, who also developed the Loongson MIPS CPU, were looking to order at least ten million graphics processors. The problem is that the GeForce / Quadro driver from NVIDIA is only available for Linux x86 and x86_64 architectures, not MIPS or even ARM (only the Tegra driver is for ARMv7). NVIDIA refused to release the source-code to their high-performance feature-complete cross-platform driver to the Chinese, and it would cost them millions of dollars to port the code-base, so they went to AMD for their GPU order.
The order was at least for ten million GPUs, which given the current low-end parts, would value the order at least 250 to 350 million dollars (USD). However, I've heard from a separate source that it was closer to the half billion dollar mark. This money will now be handed over to AMD since they have the officially-based open-source driver for their products.
Now let's hope upper-management at AMD will see the new opportunities presented by Linux and open-source so that they can ramp up their efforts... i.e. there's still really not any usable Radeon HD 7000 series support, documentation isn't complete, there's only OpenGL 3.0 compliance (no OpenGL 3.1/3.2/3.3/4.0/4.1/4.2 compliance in Mesa), there's missing features like CrossFire and advanced AA modes, OpenCL is still a work in progress, power management isn't as good as their proprietary driver, and the performance is still a ways off from hitting the Catalyst driver.
Additional details on the big loss for NVIDIA and big win for AMD in this forum thread.
Nvidia reportedly loses 10 million GPU order
Which refers to the Phoronix article I posted to start the thread.....
Comments may have further news.
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The story maybe untrue but China officially use Linux as default on all government institutions (that is almost all institutions and corporations there is government owned), and to connect Nvidia last updated Linux driver before Fermi went into being and will never support Linux anymore officially, other reason behind is the architecture itself cannot support it so. (See wikipedia about it) They pass the burden to third party group to make it. Nvidia never release an opensource driver for Linux unlike the competitor and that adds up the burden to the buyer if they are Linux based.
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As I understand the truth is that:
-the chinese government have their own mips based cpu (only used by gov/schools as the rest of china uses x86). It's long term future is debatable at best.
-they wanted the option to use nvidia gpu's with these (quite how many gov/school machines need gaming graphics is again debatable).
-to do this nvidia needs a mips port of their drivers, which is a big thing. Two ways of doing this:
a) nvidia release source/driver details and gpu details to let chinese make their own drivers. Nvidia not to keen on this as they won't release this sort of info to anyone let alone the country that are masters of the cheap knockoff.
b) nvidia write the drivers, nvidia offered to do this for lots of money. Chinese said no we refuse to spend the money. Nvidia then declined the contract.
The truth of this is there wouldn't be much money in this, it would be a lot of work, and the platform is probably going to die a death anyway.
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This is old news. The contract is more of a test run that may never reach as high as the above figures claim. If you want to read more about it, do a quick google search.
The chinese wanted source code for free and that’s all there is to it
NVIDIA rightfully refused to give it to those thieves, who would have used it against them to produce their own chips at half the price, and put NVIDIA out of business
They would have used the source code to produce chips?
The big loser is AMD because the Chinese will copy their technology just like they always do
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