Nvidia loses 10 million GPU order due to poor Linux support

[kenc51]

Nvidia isn't doing too well lately due to their lack of Linux support

Recently Linus told Nvidia "F*ck You"
This was because of their unwillingness to help the Linux community in supporting "Optimus" tech
http://forums.legitreviews.com/about41561.html

Now it seems they have lost a contract to the Chinese
How much did it cost them? Somewhere between $200 and $500 Million in revenue
The Chinese want a new GPU to support their new MIPS based CPU "Longsoon" and the Linux based OS to run on it.
Nvidia are as usual unwilling to help their developers as they somehow think providing access to source code to low level dirver fucntions is going to cost them.
In steps AMD and now they got the contract.

More here
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/nvid ... -20120628/
& here
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... px=MTEyNTE

What they don't realise is that Intel used to be this way too. Then they released the source for a chunk of their driver and firmware code.
Did Intel loose millions in revenue from this?
Hell no. They got millions of new customers, both in the consumer market and also in the enterprise market.
They also now, with the exception of their newest GPU's, have extremely stable drivers

AMD now have a ton of extra cash thanks to Nvidia and also have greater potential to really get a foothold in the chinese market.

How many times are we to read about Nvidia and their stupid business decisions?

In my opinion the shareholders should ask Jen-Hsun Huang to step down.

[Apoptosis]

In my opinion the shareholders should ask Jen-Hsun Huang to step down.

Over the past month the stock is up 11.18% and the 10 year return is 141.21%

You'll have a hard time getting shareholders to ask a CEO to step down with those numbers.

Intel is up 3.13% for the month and up 45.87% for 10 year.
Qualcomm is down 2.84% for the month and up 305.09% for 10 year
AMD is down 5.76% for the month and down 41.05% for 10 year
Freescale is up 11.41% for the month and down 45.04% for 10 year

[KnightRid]

Nvidia keeps close control of it's driver's source code and won't open up and they are labelled as evil and everyone should hate them.

Apple does the exact same thing but with everything and they are labelled as a great product that everyone should own and if you don't you are an idiot because Apple is GOD.

What is wrong with that picture

Linux support is such a small segment of the market that it may not be worth the time and effort for Nvidia to go full bore on it. If I had a choice of making windows drivers, linux drivers or both, i would pick windows in a heartbeat and release something basic for linux that would at least display the video but would not care at all about gaming support, etc.

[kenc51]

Ok asking him to step down is a little harsh, but he has made some bad decisions over the past few years.
I don't think they ever admitted it, but didn't we have "Bumpgate" as couple of years ago? Semiaccurate / Charlie D covered it.

No one is asking Nvidia to invest much resources into Linux development.
Just release the source code or at the very least do what AMD did and release the documentation.
Even if Nvidia did release the whole source from their drivers, it wouldn't give AMD / Intel much intellectual property, apart from their developers coding style.
According to Phoronix, driver source is ok. There's a chunk of code that's written in HDL (hardware description language - Verilog, VHDL and others). This is what contains all the info on how the chip(s) work and are designed.
No company will release this, nor should they.

When AMD released the documentation on their chips, they released some source and lots of details on how to use the API to interact with the hardware.
There's now two driver branches for Linux, the binary version from them and an open source version.
Ok the open source version is crap compared, but at least people can take that code and do almost anything they wish with it.
Most importanaly they can rewrite and compile it to work for another cpu architecture.
AMD are not expected to spend any time or resources on this, just update the documentation ~ 1year or so after the new GPU launches.

Sure the Linux commuinity only accounts for a small % of their user base, but it's potentially an extremely lucrative one in this case.
More and more companies are switching to Linux distros for their workstation. The Brazilliam Govt. did so the other year, IBM invest Billions into Linux in the enterprise market. Microsoft even contribute code to the Linux kernel (more than Canonical/Ubuntu has)
CUDA/OpenCL has already made it's mark.
Now we have China for the past few years saying they are going to make their own CPU and Linux based OS.
The chinese will probably drop x86 or IA-64 in a lot of use cases.
How many Chinese Govt contracts will be ported over to this new MIPS based CPU/OS? Who knows, but it's going to be big.

There are copyright and legal licensing issues as well with using the binary drivers.
Linux developers like to do things their own way, all they want is documentation.

Ohh and according to rumors (Phoronix) it's closer to $500 Million in lost revenue.
No matter how your sock portfolio looks like, giving the only other real player in your market segment this kind of cash boost can never be a good thing; especially when we know AMD can do with it.

[edit]

Qualcomm is down 2.84% for the month and up 305.09% for 10 year

Qualcomm are doing exceptionally well due to the mobile/cell phone SOC's (snapdragon) and network (satellite) chips.
It looks like they might also be investing in building their own FAB, which is astonishing.

[DragonFury]

Considering that Linux is a really small community, and that you guys can only play OpenGL Based games while the majority of games that are made under Direct X does have a tendency of making a company choose to make a driver for over the other. I know you can play any game we can but it requires you Linux guys to run an emulator to do so it is not native. Then to top it off, you have a tablet market hat is literally exploding and coming apart at the seems, which Nvidia is a part of, and you have Windows 8 coming to that market as well, which brings gaming to a mobile platform. Now you are a CEO of a major corporation, and you have to make a choice, one to send people over for driver making for a very small portion of the community, or send all available resources to R&D and make ARMs, and GPUs for the next generation gaming platform?

You guys may not like Windows 8, but it is going to help us computer users out once they figure that they can play real games on it, not these flash based POS's.

[kenc51]

DragonFury,

Providing Linux support doesn't necessarily cost money or resources, especially in this case.
Nvidia have Linux developers working for them. They use an API/Interface so they can work with the graphics chip. All they need to do is release this along with some documentation. I'm pretty sure <95% of Nvidia's developers don't know or have access to the inner workings of the chip, yet they can create software / drivers for them.

The Directx / OpenGL issue is just down to D3D being proprietary and really only affects the gamers market.
This is all about porting GFX drivers over to a new CPU architecture (MIPS).
The Chinese would have done all the hard work.

In fact there was / is an extra business opportunity; Consulting work. AMD can contract out their developers for an exorbitant fee.