Bluntly: because they don't get software and never did. The hardware is actually pretty good but the software has always been terrible and it is a serious problem because NV sure could use some real competition.

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AnthonyMouse 5 days ago | parent [-]

I wish hardware vendors would just stop trying to write software. The vast majority of them are terrible at it and even within the tiny minority that can ship something that doesn't non-deterministically implode during normal operation, the vast majority of those are a hostile lock-in play.

Hardware vendors: Stop writing software. Instead write and publish hardware documentation sufficient for others to write the code. If you want to publish a reference implementation that's fine, but your assumption should be that its primary purpose is as a form of documentation for the people who are going to make a better one. Focus on making good hardware with good documentation.

Intel had great success for many years by doing that well and have recently stumbled not because the strategy doesn't work but because they stopped fulfilling the "make good hardware" part of it relative to TSMC.

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exDM69 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I wish hardware vendors would just stop trying to write software.

How would/should this work? Release hardware that doesn't have drivers on day one and then wait until someone volunteers to do it?

> Intel had great success for many years by doing that well

Not sure what you're referring to but Intel's open source GPU drivers are mostly written by Intel employees.

	▲	adrian_b 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		The documentation can be published in advance of the product launch. Intel and AMD did this in the past for their CPUs and accompanying chipsets, when any instruction set extensions or I/O chipset specifications were published some years in advance, giving time to the software developers to update their programs. Intel still somewhat does it for CPUs, but for GPUs their documentation is delayed a lot in comparison with the product launch. AMD now has significant delays in publishing the features actually supported by their new CPUs, even longer than for their new GPUs. In order to have hardware that works on day one, most companies still have to provide specifications for their hardware products to various companies that must design parts of the hardware or software that are required for a complete system that works. The difference between now and how this was done a few decades ago, is that then the advance specifications were public, which was excellent for competition, even if that meant that there were frequently delays between the launch of a product and the existence of complete systems that worked with it. Now, these advance specifications are given under NDA to a select group of very big companies, which design companion products. This ensures that now it is extremely difficult for any new company to compete with the incumbents, because they would never obtain access to product documentation before the official product launch, and frequently not even after that.

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mschuster91 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem is, making hardware is hard. Screw something up, in the best case you can fix it in ucode, if you're not that lucky you can get away with a new stepping, but in the worst case you have to do a recall and not just deal with your own wasted effort, but also the wasted downstream efforts and rework costs.

So a lot of the complexity of what the hardware is doing gets relegated to firmware as that is easier to patch and, especially relevant for wifi hardware before the specs get finalized, extend/adapt later on.

The problem with that, in turn, is patents and trade secrets. What used to be hideable in the ASIC masks now is computer code that's more or less trivially disassemblable or to reverse engineer (see e.g. nouveau for older NVDA cards and Alyssa's work on Apple), and if you want true FOSS support, you sometimes can't fulfill other requirements at the same time (see the drama surrounding HDMI2/HDCP support for AMD on Linux).

And for anything RF you get the FCC that's going to throw rocks around on top of that. Since a few years, the unique combination of RF devices (wifi, bt, 4G/5G), antenna and OS side driver has to be certified. That's why you get Lenovo devices refusing to boot when you have a non-Lenovo USB network adapter attached at boot time or when you swap the Sierra Wireless modem with an identical modem from a Dell (that only has a different VID/PID), or why you need old, long outdated Lenovo/Dell/HP/... drivers for RF devices and the "official" manufacturer ones will not work without patching.

I would love a world in which everyone in the ecosystem were forced to provide interface documentation, datasheets, errata and ucode/firmware blobs with source for all their devices, but unfortunately, DRM, anti-cheat, anti-fraud and overeager RF regulatory authorities have a lot of influence over lawmakers, way more than FOSS advocates.

	▲	yencabulator 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Linux already maintains quirks code paths for all kinds of devices where the manufacturer "could have" updated the firmware to fix the bug but never did. It also contains quirks for Intel x86 core platform features: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/x86/kerne... For the now-fashionable LLMs-on-GPUs world, it's pretty much just matrix multiplications. How many patents can reside in that? I don't expect Google to sell TPUs because that's not the business they're in, but AMD could put them in their SoCs without writing drivers: https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/system-architecture-tpu-vm...