AMD is not competing enough with NVIDIA, so they are not a solution.

What I mean is that whenever NVIDIA removed features from their "consumer" GPUs in order to reduce production costs and increase profits, AMD immediately followed them, instead of attempting to offer GPUs that have something that NVIDIA does not have.

Intel at least tries to be a real competitor, e.g. by offering much, much better FP64 performance or by offering more memory.

If Intel's discrete GPUs disappear, there will be no competition in consumer GPUs, as AMD tries to compete only in "datacenter" GPUs. I have ancient AMD GPUs that I cannot upgrade to newer AMD GPUs, because the newer GPUs are worse, not better (for computational applications; I do not care about games), while Intel offers acceptable substitutes, due to excellent performance per $.

Moreover, NVIDIA also had excellent Linux driver support for more than 2 decades, not only for games, but also for professional graphics applications (i.e. much better OpenGL support than AMD) and for GPU computing applications (i.e. CUDA). AMD gets bonus points for open-source drivers and much more complete documentation, but the quality of their drivers has been typically significantly worse.

NVIDIA always had good support even for FreeBSD, where I had to buy discrete NVIDIA GPU cards for computers with AMD APUs that were not supported for any other OS except Windows and Linux.

AMD "consumer" GPUs are a great choice for those who are interested only in games, but not for those interested in any other GPU applications. AMD "datacenter" GPUs are good, but they are far too expensive to be worthwhile for small businesses or for individuals.

I've found the amdgpu Linux driver to be fairly buggy running dual monitors with my Radeon VII, and found things like the fTPM to be highly buggy on Threadripper 2k/x399 to the point that I had to add a dTPM. They never got things truly working properly with those more-niche products before they just.. kind of... stopped working on them. And of course ROCm is widely regarded to be a mess.

On the other hand, my Steam Deck has been exceedingly stable.

So I guess I would say: Buy AMD but understand that they don't have the resources to truly support all of their hardware on any platform, so they have to prioritize.

> What we need? Reliability. And Linux support

Both of which NVidia does a lot better in practice! I'm all for open-source in-tree drivers, but in practice, 15 years on, AMD is still buggy on Linux, whereas NVidia works well (not just on Linux but on FreeBSD too).

> I don’t judge whether implicit sync or explicit are better.

Maybe you should.

Buying AMD (for graphics) has been the only ethical choive for a long time. We must support the underdogs. Since regulation has flown the coop, we must take respondibility ourselves to fight monopolies. The short term costs may be a bit higher but the long term payoff is the only option for our self-interest!

/ steps down from soap box /

> Conclusion: Buy AMD. Excellent Linux support with in-tree drivers.

Funnily, AMD's in-tree drivers are kind of a pain in the ass. For up to a year after a new GPU is released, you have to deal with using mesa and kernel packages from outside your distro.. While if you buy a brand new nVidia card, you just install the latest release of the proprietary drivers and it'll work.

Linux's driver model really is not kind to new hardware releases.

Of course, I still buy AMD because Nvidia's drivers really aren't very good. But that first half a year was not pleasant last time I got a relatively recently released (as in, released half a year earlier) AMD card.

> Excellent Linux support with in-tree drivers. For 15 years!

Linux support has been excellent on AMD for less than 15 years though. It got really good around 10 years ago, not before.

Agreed! This is great news for AMD and users.

Those who want to run Linux seriously will buy AMD. Intel will be slowly phased out, and this will reduce maintenance and increase the quality of anything that previously had to support both Intel and AMD.

However, if Microsoft or Apple scoop up AMD, all hell will break loose. I don’t think either would have interest in Linux support.

Oh boy that strikes a nerve with the "Video memory could be gone after Suspend/Resume". Countless hours lost trying to fix a combination of drivers and systemd hooks for my laptop to be able to suspend/hibernate and wake up back again without issues... Which makes it even more complicated when using Wayland.

I have been looking at high-end laptops with dedicated AMD Graphics chip, but can't find many... So I will probably go with AMD+NVidia with MUX switch, let's see how it goes... Unless someone else has other suggestions?

> Basically, video memory could be gone after Suspend/Resume, VT-Switch and so on.

This actually makes sense: for example, a new task has swapped out previous task's data, or host and guest are sharing the GPU and pushing each others data away. I don't understand why this is not a part of GPU-related standards.

As for solution, discarding all the GPU data after resume won't help? Or keeping the data in the system RAM.

Last I tried to file a bug for a crash in an AMD Windows driver I had to through an anonymous developer I found on Discord, and despite weeks of efforts writing and sharing test case they choose to ignore the bug report I the end. The developer even asked not to be named as he might face repercussions for trying to help out.

Excellent Linux support. Except for ROCm which is a big mess.

I once had an mini pc with Nvidia. I got it for Cuda dev. One day the support for it was dropped for it so I was unable to update my system without it messing things up. So regardless of Cuda I decided Nvidia is not for me.

However, doing research when buying a new pc, I've found that AMD kind of sucks too. ROCm isn't even supported on many of the systems i was looking into. Also, I've heard their Linux graphics drivers are poor.

So basically I just rock a potato with Intel integrated graphics now. GPUs cost too much to deal with that nonsense.

FWIW, my experience gaming/web browsing/coding on a 3070 with modern drivers has been fine. Mutter and KWin both have very good Wayland sessions if you're running the new (>550-series) drivers.

> Tossing out their dGPUs, I don’t know if it is such a huge loss

It would be an enormous loss to the consumer/enthusiast GPU buyer, as a third major competitor is improving the market from what feels like years and years of dreadful price/perf ratio.

Intel's iGPUs don't seem very at risk because the market for low-power GPUs isn't very profitable to begin with. As long as Nvidia is able to sell basically any chip they want, why waste engineering hours and fab time on low-margin chips? The GT 1030 (Pascal) never got a successor, so that line is as good as dead.

Even before the Pascal GTs, most of the GT 7xx cards, which you would assume were Maxwell or Kepler from the numbering, were rebadged Fermi cards (4xx and 5xx)! That generation was just a dumping ground for all the old chips they had laying about, and given the prominence of halfway decent iGPUs by that point, I can't say I blame them for investing so little in the lineup.

That said, the dGPUs are definitely somewhat at risk, but I think the risk is only slightly elevated by this investment, given that it isn't exactly a cash cow and Intel has been doing all sorts of cost-cutting lately.

I would guess Nvidia doesn't care at all about the iGPUs, so I agree they are probably not at risk. dGPUs though I absolutely agree They are in a risky spot. Perhaps Intel was planning to kill their more ambitious GPU goals anyway, but That seems extremely unhealthy for pretty much everyone except Nvidia

5% of Ubisoft was all it took for Tencent to have very deep reaching ramifications.

They were felt at an IC level.

We'd have to see their cap table approximation, but I've seen functional control over a company with just a hair over 10% ownership given the voting patterns of the other stock holders.

5% by about any accounting makes you a very, very influential stockholder in a publicly traded company with a widely distributed set of owners.

Intel was already dead, even money from gov didn’t help them. It is old, legacy, bad corp. I think NV just wants to help them and use however it wants - Intel management will do anything they say.

Intels gpus are a better solution for almost all computing outside high end gaming, ai, and a few other tasks. For most things a better gpu is overkill and wastes energy

Would be antitrust right?

> Nvidia doesn't have a CPU offering for the datacenter market and they were blocked from acquiring ARM. It's in their interest to have a friend on the CPU side.

Someone should tell nvidia that. They sure seem to think they have a datacenter CPU.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu-superchip...

>Nvidia is fabless and has concentrated supplier and geopolitical risk with TSMC.

East India Company has been conducting continental wars on its own. A modern company with $4T valuation and a country-GDP-size revenue and possessing key military technology of today and tomorrow wars - AI software and hardware, including robotics - can successfully wage such a continental war through a suitable proxy, say an oversized private military contractor (especially if it massively armed with drones and robots), and in particular is capable of defending an island like Taiwan. (or thinking backwards - an attack on Taiwan would cause a trillion or two drop in NVDA valuation. What options get on the table when there is a threat of a trillion dollar loss ... To compare - 20 years of Iraq cost 3 trillions, ie. 150B/year buy you a lot of military hardware and action, and efficient defense of Taiwan would cost much less than that.)

    > Nvidia is fabless and has concentrated supplier and geopolitical risk with TSMC. Intel is one of the only other leading fabs onshor[e]

Something that I never read about: Why can't NVidia use Samsung fabs? They are very close to TSMC state of the art.

Intel just released a halfway decent workstation (eg data center) card and we were expecting an even better set of cards by Xmas before this happened.

> American competition isn't a zero sum, and it's in Nvidias' best interest to keep the market healthy.

Looking at Google's recent antitrust settlement, I'm not sure this is true at present.

Microsoft wasnt funding bankrupt Apple, Microsoft was settling lawsuit with Jobs just on the cusp of DOJ monopoly lwasuit. Microsoft was stealing and shipping Apple QuickTime sourcecode.

https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...

> handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million

You might want to re-read about that Apple-Microsoft incident.

Quicktime got stolen by an ex-Apple employee & in return Apple had Microsoft commit money & promise to have Office suite available on macOS/OS X

One interesting parallel is Intel and AMD back in x86 1991, which is today the reason AMD is at all allowed to produce x86 without massive patent royalties to intel. [Asianometry](https://youtu.be/5oOk_KXbw6c) had a nice summery of it.

Nvidia is leaning more into data centres, but lack a CPU architecture or expertise. Intel is struggling financially, but have knowledge in iGPUs and a vast amount of patents.

They could have alot to give one another, and it's a massive win if it keeps intel afloat.

Yeah I think Nvidia were hostile to Linux when they saw no value in it. Now it's where the machine learning is. It's the OS powering the whole AI hype train. Then there is also Steamdeck making Linux gaming not a complete write off anymore.

The days of Nvidia ignoring Linux is over.

My first thought was also that this relates to Intel's foundry business. Even if only to be able to use it in price negotiations with TSMC (it's hard to threaten to go elsewhere when there is no elsewhere left).

Which is relatively funny since the new CEO has made it clear he wants to divest on the foundry side ...

Or if monopoly laws like copyright didn't

and be enforced

x86 is important for gamers, but is it for HPC? That tends to be far less dependent on binary blobs.

As an Apple user (and even an Apple investor), I'd rather that Apple went out of business back then. If we could re-roll the invention of the (mainstream) smartphone, maybe we'd get something other than two monopolistic companies controlling everything.

For instance, maybe if there were 4 strong vendors making the devices with diverse operating systems, native apps wouldn't have ever become important, and the Web platform would have gotten better sooner to fill that gap.

Or maybe it'd have ended up the same or worse. But I just don't think Apple being this dominant has been good for the world.

Thats something Jensen Huang can do away with by bringing a golden gpu statue to the white house.

Assuming the DoJ is functional and paying attention.

    > As a Linux user who favors Intel hardware due to their Linux support

Well, AMD isn't going away yet, and they do seem to have finally released the advantage of open-source drivers. But that's still bad very for competition and prices.