Nvidia Loses 10 Million PC order in China; AMD Called In Instead

[Skurge]

I don't understand politics or how drivers are written or how good the chinese is. I'm not american so I don't have any pride in either company.

I personally wouldn't deal with the chinese, but money is money and AMD need it. AMD make money of their x86 drivers so I don't know what benefit china would get by copying them and they would still need to keep them updated which is not easy.

Should be a nice cash inject for AMD and future deals, which can only mean better GPUs AND CPUs for us concumers going forward. I think thats a good thing.

Our government is in bed with the chinese so hopefully we can get some of those cheap AMD GPU knockoff's once they make them

 

[Arkadrel]

Its weird how many people think its smart that nvidia just lost a deal of ~250 million US.

Thats alot of money (esp since its from only Graphic's card sales).
I guess they dont need it that much, and Im pretty sure AMD is all but too willing to take on that deal then.

also thats alot of schools potentially useing OpenCL instead of CUDA.

"....broken down - 100,000 schools with 100-150 PCs each."

Thats 10million - 15million PC's, then if we assume like 10 users pr each PC in Computer science classes or the like....
Thats alot of users that could end up learning programming langauges of either CUDA or OpenCL.

 

[-Slacker-]

^You're trying to talk sense into guys like ballathefeared.... BALLATHEFEARED! D:

 

[ViRGE]

BSN is such a troll rag. Sometimes I can't decide if they're actually technically inept or just act like it for the hits...

In any case, since this is China and the code apparently needed to be "recompiled", then we're almost certainly talking about Longsoon (MIPS) CPUs. NVIDIA is heavily invested in x86 on the graphics driver side of things, as all of their common platforms are x86 based (Tegra is a different driver for a different architecture). It likely would in fact be a major engineering effort for NVIDIA to port their drivers over to MIPS, and since NVIDIA has no other major MIPS users this would have been all for China.

Strip out BSN's BS and I'm not at all surprised NVIDIA wanted some money for their efforts. Remember how hard x86_64 drivers were? And that's still easier than x86/x86_64 to MIPS.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Epic fail article. I guess the ads revenue was low and they needed people to click.

 

[3DVagabond]

I've heard that nvidia are jerks to deal with in the supply chain (arrogant sums it up) but honestly, dealing with China i'd say nvidia made the right move to not divulge trade secrets or sensitive information via open source.

Kyle at hardocp has said this many times, but intellectual property does not exist at all in China. If they can steal it, they will. I hope that doesn't seem inflammatory, but its true.

Do you see the flaw in your reasoning?

 

[jor8888]

Nvidia made the smart move not getting involved, the GPU wont even make any money so why waste time dealing with them and have to give out the secret code so they can make their own later on and say bye bye we dont need u anymore.

 

[Cerb]

Nvidia made the smart move not getting involved, the GPU wont even make any money so why waste time dealing with them and have to give out the secret code so they can make their own later on and say bye bye we dont need u anymore.

+1. If the NVidia drivers haven't been actively developed to be cross-platform all these years, it will cost real money to support MIPS. If they already gave enough info to let others make it work, like AMD, the situation would be different. But, I could easily see the hassle not being worth the cost, if their option is to port their blob.

 

[Arkadrel]

+1. If the NVidia drivers haven't been actively developed to be cross-platform all these years, it will cost real money to support MIPS. If they already gave enough info to let others make it work, like AMD, the situation would be different. But, I could easily see the hassle not being worth the cost, if their option is to port their blob.

BSN guessing its worth of 250 - 350 million us dollars?

Thats ALOT of money... surely you can find someone willing to do drivers for that kinda of money. How can the hassel NOT be worth it?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Yep, MIPS is the real issue here. The driver development to create drivers and maintain them could quickly run it all into a loss. If I was AMD I would turn away until they go ARM or x86. Everything else is essentially dead and niche markets. And you dont want to have to support a huge complex setup for a niche market.

 

[ShintaiDK]

BSN guessing its worth of 250 - 350 million us dollars?

Thats ALOT of money... surely you can find someone willing to do drivers for that kinda of money. How can the hassel NOT be worth it?

What if you need to use 25million$ just to create the full featured driver sets. (I can easily see the years work of 100-200 people.) And then 5-10million$ a year in support? I dont think the profit on that revenue will turn out well.

If we talk basic 2D and 3D. Sure. But just look at Linux today. And Linux is a multitude bigger market than this deal. How are things running there?

 

[Arkadrel]

@ShintaiDK

Well lets say AMD did use 25million $ and 5$ million /year in support.

Next time they upgrade their Graphics cards, who do you think will get the contract then?
And what if MIPs catches on (in say asia)? wouldnt that be a huge advantage to have?

 

[3DVagabond]

What if you need to use 25million$ just to create the full featured driver sets. (I can easily see the years work of 100-200 people.) And then 5-10million$ a year in support? I dont think the profit on that revenue will turn out well.

If we talk basic 2D and 3D. Sure. But just look at Linux today. And Linux is a multitude bigger market than this deal. How are things running there?

Where are you pulling these numbers from? You need to have something to back them up. You can't just make up numbers to argue your case.

 

[cmdrdredd]

If only the rest of the world followed suit we could instantly cure the financial crisis. Knowledge is freedom.

So stealing everything is good?

I don't think you guys understand the potential scale of this business that just went to AMD.

And when China wants to move money, it's fvcking scary.

3 million students take college entrance exams every year.

So lets say we got from k-12 x 3 million. $30 gpu to every kid.

13x3 million x30, 1.1 billion dollars.

And this sets up the company for repeat business in Numerous other areas.

I don't care how rich anyone is right now. No one in their right mind should ever NOT gamble for 1.1 billion dollars.

Did you miss the part about China stealing the technology and releasing it from chinese companies and driving the innovator out of the market? That really does happen there you know. SO you expect Nvidia to give away their time and effort (time is money when you pay people) and get no return when the Chinese just take it and sell their own version?

 

[ShintaiDK]

@ShintaiDK

Well lets say AMD did use 25million $ and 5$ million /year in support.

Next time they upgrade their Graphics cards, who do you think will get the contract then?
And what if MIPs catches on (in say asia)? wouldnt that be a huge advantage to have?

There is alot of "what if"s. Plus who says China wont just make its own GPU or turn to another GPU maker.

If you note the latest Loongson 3/3B also ads instructions for x86 emulation. I dont think the chinese believes in MIPS themselves either for consumers.

The development of the Loongson also points towards HPC. Just look at the upcoming Loongson 3C and the Loongson-T (That returns back to 32bit, basicly a kind of Xeon Phi project.)

I dont see anyone in asia besides China using this. Japan and Korea certainly wont. And chinese home market is already x86. You can only sell Loongson CPUs to schools and government offices basicly.

 

[Cerb]

Next time they upgrade their Graphics cards, who do you think will get the contract then?
And what if MIPs catches on (in say asia)? wouldnt that be a huge advantage to have?

One thing ShintaiDK failed to note, is that the cost is not going to be equal between AMD and NVidia.

NVDA keeps 99% of their secret sauce secret. Thus, a quality driver is on them to support (thus, they'd want to be paid the cost, on top of the rest). AMD keeps their secret sauce 1% secret, cross-platform C drivers already exist (quality may be another issue, but the base work is there), and there are many FOSS devs to help out. The likely result will be that it will be cheaper for both China and AMD, and the Chinese have enough info to work on drivers themselves, if they feel the need.

Also, if they were looking for a more long-term relationship, AMD already has a history of licensing just the designs, so they could make a Longsoon SoC w/ an AMD GPU (the Chinese could "steal" it, but it would not be worth the burned bridges).

 

[ShintaiDK]

So stealing everything is good?




Did you miss the part about China stealing the technology and releasing it from chinese companies and driving the innovator out of the market? That really does happen there you know. SO you expect Nvidia to give away their time and effort (time is money when you pay people) and get no return when the Chinese just take it and sell their own version?

They just do like western companies

 

[Keysplayr]

Where are you pulling these numbers from? You need to have something to back them up. You can't just make up numbers to argue your case.

You should let him use any numbers he wishes. As you can see, Arkadrel just used those numbers against him. So, no worries, anything can be turned around.

On topic, I wouldn't really want my code for my product open sourced to China. IMHO Nvidia made the better decision.

 

[Fox5]

Is AMD just giving them their existing open source code, or open sourcing their catalyst drivers? There's a reason they don't open source the drivers from day 1, there's a lot of proprietary information in them they don't want to give away. Well, it's given away now.

AMD has also put effort into making their gpus compatible with ARM through HSA, so it's likely they could do MIPS or whatever architecture the Chinese want.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Just a note, there is absolutely no source or links in the article. Meaning it can be real or just homebrew.

Personally I think its just another BS article tho

 

[postmortemIA]

I don't think you guys understand the potential scale of this business that just went to AMD.

And when China wants to move money, it's fvcking scary.

3 million students take college entrance exams every year.

So lets say we got from k-12 x 3 million. $30 gpu to every kid.

13x3 million x30, 1.1 billion dollars.

And this sets up the company for repeat business in Numerous other areas.

I don't care how rich anyone is right now. No one in their right mind should ever NOT gamble for 1.1 billion dollars.

Whole graphics card might be $30, but chip itself might not be more than $10. Chinese
need only the chip, they'll make rest cheap.

 

[cmdrdredd]

They just do like western companies

Here there are some laws against blatant stealing of proprietary technology and patents. Broken as it is.

 

[Eug]

I don't see the problem. nVidia did the right thing to protect their business IMO. Torvalds is just being a baby.

 

[Schmide]

As much as some may want to put this on Linus and his finger, I think in this situation AMD just has a better package for what China wants. Their lower cards 7750+ have more than trivial double precision compute, are much faster than nvidias segment (no 650?), and have better OpenCL performance. As fast and efficient as kepler is, it is a highly tiered less well rounded solution.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Here there are some laws against blatant stealing of proprietary technology and patents. Broken as it is.

The law about who got the biggest amount of lawyers wins?