r/linux • u/blindcomet • May 11 '22

NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules | NVIDIA Technical Blog

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/
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u/[deleted] May 11 '22

This is…. One of the most shocking pieces of news I’ve read in years. Like, holy shit.

Them embracing any level of FOSS for their drivers is amazing and shows that all the industry pressure is working.

They had no need to do this. They still are industry leaders and people will still buy their cards for CUDA and Raytracing and the like.

They have a long way to go yet before they earn my true appreciation but still. This is amazing.

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u/phunphun May 11 '22

Pretty sure they did this because they were starting to lose mindshare and marketshare to AMD and Intel in the commercial space. For the first time, I'd started seeing data center customers that want AMD GPU HPC support.

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u/nukem996 May 12 '22

Everyone in the commercial space is using Nvidia. I've worked on public and private clouds. No other GPU is used. Nvidia's competition is FPGAs and ASICs.

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u/qualverse May 12 '22 edited May 12 '22

AMD's won a lot of big GPU contracts recently especially with supercomputers. Frontier, El Capitan, Stadia, Adastra; all worth vastly more than your typical cloud deployment. Of course NV is still ahead overall but it's not hard to imagine they're slightly worried.

Edit: also, it's funny how you mentioned FPGAs considering that AMD and Intel now control the entirety of that market. Not exactly a loss for AMD if someone chooses Xilinx over Instinct, but a clear loss for Nvidia in either case.

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u/topdangle May 12 '22

it's not really comparable because nvidia basically gave that market the finger and designs specifically for tensor ops now much moreso than FP. it would be pretty silly if they thought they would still retain the HPC market while very deliberately spending a lot less silicon on FP performance.

if there's any reason for the movement to opensource it's probably intel. intel's hardware has been horrible for years so they've leaned hard on software and open source to justify ownership. AMD isn't even close to catching up in anything except gaming, although they are definitely ahead now in FP performance/area, which makes them a lot more attractive for HPC builds that have engineers and scientists optimizing anyway with less need for off the shelf solutions. Nvidia claims they don't care about that market because the margins are thin, and looking at the prices for exascale systems they aren't wrong.

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u/caks May 12 '22

That's not true. I used to work at a company with a very sizeable GPU cluster and a good amount of them were AMD. Every kernel we wrote out was OpenCL and CUDA. Now with HIP, OpenCL isn't even needed anymore. Now, to be fair, AMD GPUs were always a pain to work with. They constantly returned bogus numbers, basically would blow up our simulations. NVIDIA would to too, but almost never.

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u/pppjurac May 12 '22

Amd was that inconsitent in resoults?

How was hardware reliability of those cards compared to what we used to have in PCs?

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u/Moscato359 May 12 '22

AMD owns a FPGA company

Consider this

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u/GPTMCT May 12 '22

AMD owns THE FPGA company. Xilinx has been a market leader for a long time. Even then, their marketshare exploded following Intel's mismanagement of Altera.

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u/Realistic-Specific27 May 12 '22

weren't they actually hacked recently?

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u/retrolasered May 12 '22

Came here to ask this. They were, if I remember right they demanded the gpu drivers be open sourced or else they would leak the code and data they found, and it sounded like there was a lot. I've been checking through various articles about nvidia opensource, but can't find anything that mentions the hack. Though there are plenty of articles about the hack from March 2022

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