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

[BudAshes]

Oh look, Nvidia being scumbags again, who would have guessed?

Also lol at the US, your arrogance will be your downfall... I give it 50 years before China takes over

takes over what? They're not taking us over so it's you weaker countries that will be going down. Enjoy.

 

[Cerb]

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.

The GPU just sits across a PCI-e, HT, or whatever controller link. It really doesn't care about the rest. If you give an ARM SoC a PCI-e controller, you should have all you need to start working out any ARM compatibility kinks.

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

Torvalds has nothing to do with it. That's just mentioned due to timing.

 

[BenSkywalker]

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

You mean you guys don't understand how AMD decided to give away all of their R&D for next to nothing to let a Chinese fab turn out billions of dollars worth of hardware that AMD will get next to nothing for up front, then nothing at all in the long term? I think those of us who have been alive any reasonable amount of time understand it all too well.

China considers it legal, moral and ethical to roll tanks over children. What kind of importance do you think they place on IP?

 

[sandorski]

You mean you guys don't understand how AMD decided to give away all of their R&D for next to nothing to let a Chinese fab turn out billions of dollars worth of hardware that AMD will get next to nothing for up front, then nothing at all in the long term? I think those of us who have been alive any reasonable amount of time understand it all too well.

China considers it legal, moral and ethical to roll tanks over children. What kind of importance do you think they place on IP?

Who is talking about Fabs and Manufacturing of Chips? This is about a Driver, Software, not Hardware.

 

[ShintaiDK]

China considers it legal, moral and ethical to roll tanks over children. What kind of importance do you think they place on IP?

They might use tanks. We just use airplanes with bombs

 

[Schmide]

They might use tanks. We just use airplanes with bombs

WTH is this?. China is a space age country! Or do you not read the news?

 

[ShintaiDK]

WTH is this?. China is a space age country! Or do you not read the news?

It was more like quoting that we bomb innocents in the socalled war on terror. When he started about the Tiananmen Square.

Anyway, we are argueing about an article with nothing to back it up. And the comments below from Theo doesnt make it any more credible. And its getting a bad turn into some kind of stupid flamefest vs China.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Who is talking about Fabs and Manufacturing of Chips? This is about a Driver, Software, not Hardware.

Chips are relatively easy to copy and mass produce. Custom driver software, not so much.

 

[sandorski]

Chips are relatively easy to copy and mass produce. Custom driver software, not so much.

Ya, and? Hasn't AMD already let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, by having the Driver OpenSource for year(s) now?

 

[BenSkywalker]

Hasn't AMD already let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, by having the Driver OpenSource for year(s) now?

MIPS open source drivers? I wasn't aware AMD supported MIPS at all. nVidia did for a while back when SGI was still in business(absolutely *NOT* open source), I can't recall ATi ever having support for Irix or any other MIPS platform.

 

[sandorski]

MIPS open source drivers? I wasn't aware AMD supported MIPS at all. nVidia did for a while back when SGI was still in business(absolutely *NOT* open source), I can't recall ATi ever having support for Irix or any other MIPS platform.

But they have for Linux. I'm sure "sensitive", if there is such a thing, data can be gathered from that.

 

[Schmide]

Looked it up

http://www.lemote.com/products/computer/yilong/312.html

The LOONGSON runs on a AMD RS780E+SB710 chipset.

 

[piasabird]

I am in the USA near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers. It is a dilusion to think that the USA runs the computer industry. Even if a company is USA run, it is often staffed with asian developors and designers, and built overseas with foreign factories and foreign labor. Even Apple has been accused of using what is basically slave labor.

I think there is a significant possibility for China to take over the computer industry. Many motherboards are manufactured there and there are even silicone plants based in China. You could say that Taiwan is the greatest thing to ever happen to China.

 

[Rezist]

Missing out on business in china is never a bad thing. Look at ford and bmw do you think they appreciated when the chinese companies they contracted to build there vehicles used the same facilities they paid for to produce copies of there vehicles and then get nothing from the sale. And don't mention chinese education either you don't even need to be capable of reading or speaking english to pass there english courses.

 

[piasabird]

Is it strange that the biggest Communist country could become the biggest Capitalist country. However, pollution could destroy China First. Asia is a continent where few countries care about the environment.

 

[tommo123]

Missing out on business in china is never a bad thing. Look at ford and bmw do you think they appreciated when the chinese companies they contracted to build there vehicles used the same facilities they paid for to produce copies of there vehicles and then get nothing from the sale. And don't mention chinese education either you don't even need to be capable of reading or speaking english to pass there english courses.

this is something i'm curious about. what happens when chinese companies try to sell rip offs of western products back? can the original companies block their imports?

 

[ShintaiDK]

this is something i'm curious about. what happens when chinese companies try to sell rip offs of western products back? can the original companies block their imports?

Yes. just as chinese companies can block western companies making ripoffs of chinese products. Apple comes to mind here.

 

[notty22]

Not much.
China is even getting in on black market food.
Truffles: The Most Expensive Food in the World

European white truffles can sell for as much as $3,600 a pound, making them and their fellow fungi the most expensive food in the world. One two-pound truffle recently sold for more than $300,000. All of which has brought organized crime into the truffle trade, creating a black market and leading to theft of both truffles as well as the highly valued truffle-sniffing dogs. Add to that the influx of the inferior Chinese truffles -- masquerading as their European cousins -- and you've got trouble with truffles.

 

[Cerb]

Ya, and? Hasn't AMD already let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, by having the Driver OpenSource for year(s) now?

AMD's 3D-supporting driver is not open source, so no. It's a blob. What they have done is release documentation for the vast majority of each GPU's inner workings, and then let a few of their people help the community devs out with the FOSS drivers.

But they have for Linux. I'm sure "sensitive", if there is such a thing, data can be gathered from that.

No more or less than on Windows/x86, or with Geforces. Their official driver is a blob. If they can easily recompile it for MIPS, it will still be a blob.

What they did was release hardware documentation, to enable others to work on drivers. With Geforces, Nouvaeu is having to clean-room reverse-engineer everything, and so their progress has, for various features, been limited and sporadic. Not that it's not impressive what they've done, but supporting them or relying on them makes no sense, from any major organization's view. With AMD, there is the option of using and improving the libre drivers.

MIPS open source drivers? I wasn't aware AMD supported MIPS at all. nVidia did for a while back when SGI was still in business(absolutely *NOT* open source), I can't recall ATi ever having support for Irix or any other MIPS platform.

Why would AMD need to directly support it[, at no additional cost]? The Chinese could pay coders very low wages to help improve the FOSS drivers, and come out cheaper [than paying AMD or NVidia employers developed world living wages for the work].

 

[Atreidin]

Access to driver source code doesn't magically give anyone information on how to duplicate the hardware. I'm not sure where some of you are getting that idea from. It just shows you have no idea how GPU (or pretty much any other hardware) development works.

You are really reaching for excuses for Nvidia giving up all that money. It's kind of sad. They don't need you as their white knight.

 

[AnandThenMan]

You are really reaching for excuses for Nvidia giving up all that money. It's kind of sad. They don't need you as their white knight.

Let's face it, if Nvidia was going bankrupt, there would be some here that would find a way to spin it into a positive. If this story is indeed true, really dumb move by Nvidia they can only burn so many bridges. And you absolutely cannot alienate the Chinese market, the growth potential dwarfs any other region currently.

 

[notty22]

Similar to when AMD lost, won, then lost Apple's favor ?

It's more logical to assume a fanboy can armchair quarterback a company better than it's CEO/BOD, and that, the choice Nvidia made is obviously flawed. /sarcasm

 

[pelov]

What they did was release hardware documentation, to enable others to work on drivers.

Someone finally pinned the tail on the donkey

Regardless of AMD's MIPS support (this really doesn't matter, as was pointed out above), if China had went nVidia they'd have had to rely entirely on nVidia's drivers/support. First, that's a big risk. Second, nVidia was charging up the wazoo. With AMD they won't have that issue and if they do run into problems they have the capacity (AMD is more than willing to open source drivers) and the will to address it themselves. So they saved money and it's much easier. As many in the tech industry have pointed out, nVidia can be a huge PITA to work with -- and it's not just Linus, small-time developers, Microsoft and others have said this much as well.

This notion of deconstructing hardware in order to learn trade secrets is silly. All it would take for them to do this (on the hardware side) is to walk into a Chinese equivalent Best Buy and spend a few grand on Laptops. If the Chinese have stolen anything or are planning to steal any sooperseekrit Silicon knowledge you can rest assured that it's already been done.

Letting a 250+million dollar deal slip through your fingers is not good business. It's arrogance. It's not like this was a moral issue either. This is nVidia we're talking about.

 

[Schmide]

Note: China is paying licenses for Hypertransport, so at least in this regard they are not stealing IP.

 

[soccerballtux]

in addition, you can't call it "losing" business if YOU turned the client down.