Hacker News

points by jleask 4 days ago | 0 comments

Nvidia doing what Nvidia has always done; proprietary closed drivers. Weird choice to cryptographically protect the power settings. Key problem is that we've allowed a company that's always been this way to form a monopoly. Other brands exist, perhaps it is now worth the effort to migrate and rebuild elsewhere.

[–] r3trohack3r 3 days ago

> Key problem is that we've allowed a company that's always been this way to form a monopoly.

I don’t think anyone “allowed” them - quite the opposite. They’ve made generational bets that ended up being right, bets that IIRC the industry did not agree with for a long time. Them pursuing CUDA resulted in a draw down of something crazy like 75% of their valuation. They bet the farm multiple times to get to the point they are - and it’s only “obvious” in hindsight.

If you want folks to make generational bets as a matter of course (which I think most folks do), centralizing the downside of those bets and socializing the upside of those bets is not a great strategy. Almost as bad as socializing the downside.

Competition will eventually close that gap. We’re only a few years into this thing.

[–] thrance 3 days ago

Monopolies don't naturally decay, competition can't close the gap against an entrenched titan that can either buy or asphyxiate them.

[–] krapht 3 days ago

I know NVIDIA is dominating the market, but it's not like AMD/Intel/Google don't have credible alternatives. Hipify/OneAPI/MLIR(Jax etc) can be used today, it's just not as ergonomic as CUDA.

[–] logancbrown 3 days ago

You could have done maybe 20 seconds of research to find what you posted is not correct "Monopolies don't naturally decay".

Have you ever heard of U.S. Steel, IBM, Kodak, and Western Union?

[–] thrance 3 days ago

These monopolies were defeated (or weakened) by new technologies they didn't adopt early enough, not by market forces like competition.

[–] logancbrown 3 days ago

New technologies are indeed how natural competition market forces primarily work.

[–] thrance 3 days ago

Hmm... I kind of disagree with that. Technological breakthroughs are not "natural". We shouldn't have to bet on someone discovering something that is able to make NVIDIA obsolete.

[–] afarah1 4 days ago

New generations such as Blackwell have open source kernel modules, there is not even a proprietary option. I thought there was a move in this direction?

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-t...

[–] kllrnohj 3 days ago

Nvidia enabled that by offloading stuff that used to be in the proprietary driver onto the still proprietary GPU firmware. Making it, if anything, less open source as it's now harder to inspect what it's doing at runtime since it's now out of reach of even the kernel

[–] maxhille 4 days ago

AFAIK the open source kernel driver pushes a signed proprietary 500Mb firmware blob into the GPU.

[–] NekkoDroid 4 days ago

The total linux-firmware-nvidia package for Archlinux uncompressed (outer, the firmware blobs are also compressed on top of that) is ~160MB (Mb would be Megabit), with the biggest individual compressed blob being ~50MB.

[–] maxhille 4 days ago

You are right the firmware packages are smaller. I mixed it up with the VRAM the GSP uses after being loaded.

Point was about the kernel drivers being open-source enabling hackability - they don't, the card hardware is just as closed as before.

[–] mrheosuper 3 days ago

50MB is a lot of code. Linux kernel in minimal config will use significantly less than that.

[–] NekkoDroid 3 days ago

Never wanted to imply it wasn't. AMDGPUs firmware package is a total of 27MB and the biggest single blob is 1,5MB.

[–] dist-epoch 4 days ago

It's not weird at all, they know people will buy these laptops, put linux on them and stash them in data-centers, so they are trying to prevent this.

[–] Roark66 3 days ago

Not those laptops.

I was genuinely excited about this device until I heard the specs. Still under 300GB/s memory bandwidth when a gpu like rtx3090 from 6 years ago had 900+

This is really bread crumbing local inference users.

We should be measuring our memory bandwidth in TB by now. The only company that seems to be serious about this is Apple. (the m5 ultra studio etc).

[–] jasomill 3 days ago

If this were cost-effective, why wouldn't they just buy DGX Sparks, with similar performance at similar price points and a more convenient form factor?

Or RTX Spark and run their workloads under WSL, which as the article notes, has minimal overhead relative to running Linux directly?

This sounds more like a bug than a feature, especially given that Linux on battery runs at full clock speed and downclocks when plugged in, and Windows does the opposite, suggesting they could at least mitigate the problem with no changes to their software stack by inverting a conditional in the firmware and adding a Linux kernel parameter to control memory allocation as apparently already exists for Windows.

[–] kllrnohj 3 days ago

that seems really hard to believe? If you wanted this running Linux in a data center you'd have just been buying the cheaper and yet also more powerful DGX Sparks.

The only value proposition of RTX Spark at all is the laptop form factor

[–] dist-epoch 3 days ago

> NVIDIA says that the new DGX Spark 64GB is starting at $4,999

> NVIDIA has now confirmed an official starting price of $2,399 for RTX Spark laptops

https://shattered.io/nvidia-rtx-spark-mediatek-oems-price-20...

https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-dgx-spark-64gb-launched-...

[–] kllrnohj 3 days ago

Nvidia's MSRP is full of shit and has been for a long time. You see it with desktop GPUs all the time, even before the AI boom, where Nvidia would make up an MSRP but not offer a card at that price themselves, and none of the AIBs would, either, except for some token amount that rapidly sold out and were never restoked.

If we look at what you can actually buy the 64GB RTX Spark is $4,500 and the 128GB one is $7,000: https://eshop.asus.com/us/31150-us-cnf-auto.html & https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptop-computers/spd/xps16dx...

Hell there doesn't seem to be an RTX Spark that's sub $3,300 when considering the 32GB models even. $2,399 is pure fiction.

[–] jasomill 3 days ago

The minimum configuration appears to be 24GB / 18 core, which at least one vendor, Microsoft, is selling for $2,599.99, which is at least closer to $2,399 than $3,000+.

[–] jasomill 3 days ago

If datacenters aren't lining up to buy 64GB DGX Sparks for $5,000, what makes you think they'd be interested in 24GB RTX Sparks with fewer cores and less attractive form factors for almost half that?

And if there's a market for a DGX Spark configuration with a higher compute-to-RAM ratio, why isn't Nvidia offering it?

My best guess is that the entry-level Sparks are mostly intended for people who would otherwise be in the market for a traditional high-end laptop, who might be enticed to spend a few hundred more for at least the promise of local AI, while the higher-end models are intended for more serious AI development.

With that said, it's not hard to imagine there isn't nearly as large a built-in market for high-end SFF Linux PCs as there is for high-end Windows laptops.

[–] Roark66 3 days ago

No sane perse would buy dgx spark for datacenter. If you need Blackwell for the native nvfp4 you'd be better buying pallets of rtx5060 ti 16GB. Or if you don't, pallets of used rtx3090s.

In fact I'm pretty sure it's happening. Why? Because of constantly growing prices of those things.

[–] kllrnohj 3 days ago

Sure, but if you think it's insane to buy a DGX Spark for a datacenter, then it's equally insane to buy an RTX Spark (which is the exact same SoC just with less networking and a screen) for the datacenter.

[–] aurareturn 4 days ago

Yes, exactly this.

Nvidia does something to prevent abuse so that regular people who want the laptops can buy one. Nvidia gets knocked on.

[–] kllrnohj 3 days ago

Regular people aren't buying a $4,500 laptop lol wtf are you talking about?

This is all but certainly a bug in their linux driver and nothing else. It sure as hell isn't some "anti abuse" to enable "regular people" to buy one.

[–] wqtz 4 days ago

> we've allowed a company

When did "we" have a say in this? I don't get these types of comments from the "open-source as a community."

Nvidia has been doing this for decades, and there are two possible arguments:

1. They are successful despite it.

2. They are successful because of it.

There is no mythical collective "we" representing the open-source community in Nvidia's supply chain of success. It's Nvidia and its consumers.

[–] tancop 3 days ago

It's "we" as a society. Not pushing our governments to pass laws that could make Nvidia open up its hardware. Of course it's not your fault or mine, the problem is money in politics and uneducated voters.

[–] ion_trapper 3 days ago

As we speak, there are numerous projects being worked on that you have no idea will be immensely useful to you in 10 years, and the people who are working on these projects are more likely than not motivated by the potential of future profit. 10 years from now, when you have recognized the value of these projects, you will take them for granted and demand you get them for free. CUDA was one of those projects 10 years ago. “We” can choose to start the precedent of scavanging CUDA today, but the price will be that those projects 10 years down the road won’t materialize.

[–] NoidFonsense 4 days ago

how are they going to sell you a subscripton to overclock your GPU otherwise?

[–] jleask 4 days ago

Sad but probably close to the truth. I'm old enough to remember when companies were able to make money without actively robbing their customers

[–] Orygin 3 days ago

They always have been robbing their customers. They have sold locked down GPU for ever

[–] bigyabai 3 days ago

And people keep coming back. Myself included; there's no similar GPU products from AMD, Apple or Intel.

Nvidia won because their architecture is better. If you do a significant amount of work that can be CUDA-accelerated, you're kinda wasting your time not owning a CUDA-capable card. It's like being a video editor that software-encodes their projects because they don't want to get an accelerator card. It's your choice, but software-acceleration is a nightmare compared to how quick and efficient hardware-acceleration is. Competitors will all use the accelerator card and ship faster than you can.

Apple, AMD and Intel have all earned their current position by abandoning Khronos and refusing to build their own GPGPU architecture. If the entire industry refuses to invest in complex technology just because it's expensive, then they don't deserve to make money.

[–] jack_pp 4 days ago

they could make money that way right now but they figured out they can make even more money by doing this. but jokes on them, people will figure it out, unlock / jailbreak and they just lose good will long term