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by ev1 1915 days ago
Nvidia already dictates what their consumer products can be used for, and legally restricts you from doing business-like activities without moving up to the enterprise cards
2 comments

This is the first I've ever heard of this, wow. I have an nvidia card and certainly do "business-like activities" with it, not at any particular scale but for my own income and whatnot. Is this something I should be considering moving to AMD over?
Yeah I was surprised by this as well, but apparently you cannot use NVIDIA cards to run enterprise deep learning workloads ("in a data center")... was super super shocked to hear this.. like isn't this one of the primary use cases...?

Bizarre

IIRC you have to use their more expensive Tesla cards for these use cases. These cards are basically the same as consumer GPUs with more permissive driver licensing
Nice thanks, never followed up, I just assembled my contraband server and never thought about it again. Do you know if you can just buy them for personal (i.e. startup) use as well?
Can you please provide any (semi-)official source for this statement? So if nVidia graphic card makes me money in any way, I'm breaching some license? Of the driver?
They try to restrict you from using consumer cards for HPC computing and have it in their EULA. You can circumvent it a bit, but if you want to buy a hardware compute cluster you _can_ have problems if you want to use consumer grade cards (many hardware vendors that sell clusters kind of ignore this though)

Also nvidia just released (and did something like this before) GPUs specifically for miners. This was seen critical for many reasons for instance the fact that it was done while a "silicon shortage" was/is happening and the inability for users to later use these cards for gaming (note: nvidia fucked up royally and released a driver that can circumvent those restrictions)

Those are just a few examples.

https://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/lice...

> No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.