[justinclift]

For Nvidia, the most likely reason they've strongly avoided Open Sourcing their drivers isn't anything like that.

It's simply a function of their history. They used to have high priced professional level graphics cards ("Nvidia Quadro") using exactly the same chips as their consumer graphics cards.

The BIOS of the cards was different, enabling different features. So people wanting those features cheaply would buy the consumer graphics cards and flash the matching Quadro BIOS to them. Worked perfectly fine.

Nvidia naturally wasn't happy about those "lost sales", so began a game of whack-a-mole to stop BIOS flashing from working. They did stuff like adding resistors to the boards to tell the card whether it was a Geforce or Quadro card, and when that was promptly reverse engineered they started getting creative in other ways.

Meanwhile, they couldn't really Open Source their drivers because then people could see what the "Geforce vs Quadro" software checks were. That would open up software countermeasures being developed.

---

In the most recent few years the professional cards and gaming cards now use different chips. So the BIOS tricks are no longer relevant.

Which means Nvidia can "safely" Open Source their drivers now, and they've begun doing so.

--

Note that this is a copy of my comment from several months ago, as it's just as relevant now as it was then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418278

[SuperNinKenDo]

Very interesting, thanks for the perspective. I suspect all the recent loss of face they experienced with the transition to Wayland happening around the time that this motivation evaporated also probably plays a part too though.

I swore off ever again buying Nvidia, or any laptops that come with Nvidia, after all this. Maybe in 10 years they'll have managed to right the brand perceptions of people like myself.

[1oooqooq]

interesting timing to recall that story. now the same trick is used for h100 vs whatever the throttled-for-embargo-wink-wink Chinese version is called.

but those companies are really adverse to open sourcing because they can't be sure they own all the code. it's decades of copy pasting reference implementations after all

[rfoo]

> now the same trick is used for h100 vs whatever the throttled-for-embargo-wink-wink Chinese version

No. H20 is a different chip designed to be less compute-dense (by having different combinations of SM/L2$/HBM controller). It is not a throttled chip.

A800 and H800 are A100/H100 with some area of the chip physically blown up and reconfigured. They are also not simply throttled.

[1oooqooq]

that's what nvidia told everyone in mar 23... but there's a reason why h800 were included last minute on the embargo in oct 23.

[rfoo]

That's not what NVIDIA claimed, that's what I have personally verified.

> there's a reason why h800 were included last minute

No. Oct 22 restrictions are by itself significantly easier than Oct 23 one. NVIDIA just need to kill 4 NVLink lanes off A100 and you get A800. For H100 you kill some more NVLink until on paper NVLink bandwidth is roughly at A800 level again and then voila.

BIS is certainly pissed off by NVIDIA's attempt at being creative to sell the best possible product to China. So they actually lowered allowed compute number AGAIN in Oct 23. That's what killed H800.

[1oooqooq]

I see. thanks for the details.

[CamperBob2]

The explanation could also be as simple as fear of patent trolls.