Cuda is the main reason Nvidia has their monopoly. Especially their artifiical limitations on VRAM for more expensive cards would make AMD a lot more interesting if AMD actually had good support.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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How does this make sense? If you've got an NVIDIA card, you don't need an emulation level. And if you have a different hardware that needs an emulation layer, you don't have to agree to those NVIDIA terms, because you are not using their products.
The EULA is associated with the CUDA software, not the NVIDIA hardware.
Ah, OK. TIL. Thanks.
The "cuda cores" you are probably thinking of are hardware implementations of the cuda software
I guess this is Nvidia's reaction to projects like ZLUDA.
And that's a textbook case why monopolies are bad for pretty much everyone except the shareholders of that monopolistic company.
I am extremely tempted to @ some guy who was shilling for nvidia and saying they weren't a monopoly.
Part of it depends on how you define things. They're not a monopoly in terms of having eliminated all their competitors, but they're a defacto monopoly in terms of being able to do the things a monopoly can. As an example, they can dictate pricing for the whole market as their margins are better than AMD's, so if AMD undercut them, they can retaliate by dropping their prices to the point AMD would have to sell at cost, so AMD can only sell things in the narrow price window where Nvidia doesn't feel threatened. On the other hand, AMD does exist and does sell things.
In gaming subs you'll meet them plenty
This feels illegal. Like it's probably not, but it should be.
That's the neat thing about being in the American oligarchs class. If it's illegal just make it legal.
Feels like a fantastic base for an anti-trust case at the least.
It probably is. In the EU APIs aren't copyrightable in the first place, doubly so if it's necessary for interoperability, in the US there's Google vs. Oracle which declared Google's use of Java APIs in Android fair use.
I tried to read the article but i am too stupid. I think nvidia has a proprietary hardware/software combo that is very fast, but because they "own it" they want money; instead other companies are using this without paying... Am i close?
It's not about it being fast, it's about it only being available for NVidia GPUs. As long as software for things like machine learning uses CUDA, you need to buy an NVidia GPU to use it. A translation layer would let you use the same software on other companies' GPUs, which means people aren't forced to buy NVidia's GPUs anymore.
You can use graphics cards for more than just graphics, eg for AI. Nvidia is a leader in facilitating that.
They offer a software toolkit for developing programs (an SDK) that use their GPUs to best effect. People have begun making "translation layers" that allow such CUDA programs to run on non-nvidia hardware. (I have no idea how any of this works.) The license of that SDK now forbids reverse engineering its output to create these compatibility tools.
Unless I am very mistaken, Nvidia can't ban the use of "translation layers" or stop people making them, as such. This clause creates a barrier to creating them, though.
Some programs will probably remain CUDA specific, because of that clause. That means that Nvidia is a gatekeeper for these programs and can charge extra for access.
Thanks
Definitely not anticompetitive in the slightest. No need to look here, FTC.
Interoperability is illegal now?
Is this in response to AMD's cuda adaptor
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