> What I can't figure out is why this is such a big deal to regulators.
Because when you own all the IP, you can cut your competitors off by revoking licenses to them, and it'll instantly kill a huge ecosystem from Raspberry/OrangePi to Ampere A1 and everything in between.
I'm not sure nVidia would make such a drastic move, but I'm sure that they'll move strategically to ensure their leadership, which is understandable from a corporate PoV, but it'll be very bad for everybody else.
This is not a big deal, it's a huge deal, and I'm happy that we're here as of today.
nVidia can of course license ARM to embed and/or further improve upon this, or they can use any other ISA or come up with their own. I'm sure they're capable of this, and it'll be much better in the long run for everyone.
> I also think it's foolish to think that Apple won't try to expand this tech offering well beyond personal computers and tablets. They will expand to IoT/Edge devices and services. But the difference is they won't be licensing their IP to other manufacturers, they will be building it themselves (or contracting Foxconn to) and keeping everything in their walled garden.
nVidia's walled garden is not different in any scale when compared to Apple. Considering how friendly nVidia was towards OpenCL, I'm guessing that they'll be at roughly the same distance towards Vulkan for GPGPU applications, keeping CUDA the only possible thing to run with any meaningful performance on their hardware. On the open driver front, they're equally friendly. So it's more like the pot is calling the kettle black here.
Because when you own all the IP, you can cut your competitors off by revoking licenses to them, and it'll instantly kill a huge ecosystem from Raspberry/OrangePi to Ampere A1 and everything in between.
I'm not sure nVidia would make such a drastic move, but I'm sure that they'll move strategically to ensure their leadership, which is understandable from a corporate PoV, but it'll be very bad for everybody else.
This is not a big deal, it's a huge deal, and I'm happy that we're here as of today.
nVidia can of course license ARM to embed and/or further improve upon this, or they can use any other ISA or come up with their own. I'm sure they're capable of this, and it'll be much better in the long run for everyone.
> I also think it's foolish to think that Apple won't try to expand this tech offering well beyond personal computers and tablets. They will expand to IoT/Edge devices and services. But the difference is they won't be licensing their IP to other manufacturers, they will be building it themselves (or contracting Foxconn to) and keeping everything in their walled garden.
nVidia's walled garden is not different in any scale when compared to Apple. Considering how friendly nVidia was towards OpenCL, I'm guessing that they'll be at roughly the same distance towards Vulkan for GPGPU applications, keeping CUDA the only possible thing to run with any meaningful performance on their hardware. On the open driver front, they're equally friendly. So it's more like the pot is calling the kettle black here.