What bugs me about companies like NV is that if they just sold their hardware and published the specs they'd probably sell more than with all this ridiculously locked down nonsense, it is just a lot of work thrown at limiting your customers and protecting a broken business model.

If Nvidia enabled all their professional features on all gaming SKUs, the only reason to buy a professional SKU would be additional memory.

Today, they make almost $1B per year in the professional non-datacenter business alone. There is no way they’d be able to compensate that revenue with volume (and gross margins would obviously tank as well, which makes Wall Street very unhappy.)

That’s obviously even more so in today’s market conditions.

Do you feel it’s justified that you have to pay $10K extra for the self-driving feature on a Tesla? Or should they also be forced to give away that feature for free? After all, it’s just a SW upgrade. (Don’t mistake this for an endorsement...)

I feel like i already paid for the hardware. If telsa says it's cheaper for them to stick the necessary hardware into every car, i'm still paying for it if i buy one without self-driving. Thus if i think the tesla software isn't worth 10k and i'd rather use openpilot, i feel like i should have the right to do that.

But nvidia is also actively interfering with open source drivers (nouveau) with signature checks etc.

The whole focus on hardware is just bizarre.

When you buy a piece of SW that has free features but requires a license key to unlock advanced features, everything is fine, but the moment HW is involved all of that flies out of the window.

Extra features cost money to implement. Companies want to be paid for it.

A company like Nvidia could decide to make 2 pieces of silicon, one with professional features and once without. Or they could disable it.

Obviously, you’d prefer the first option, even if it absolutely makes no sense to do so. It’d be a waste of engineering resources that could have been spent on future products.

Deciding to disable a feature on a piece of silicon is no different than changing a #define or adding “if (option)” to disable an advanced feature.

By doing so, I have the option to not pay for an advanced feature that I don’t need.

I don’t want the self-driving option in a Tesla and I’m very happy to have that option.

The issue is not that Tesla FSD should come with the hardware, the issue is that if I buy the hardware I should have the right to do whatever I want with it, and so we shouldn't leave aside that Tesla prevents us from running our own software.

This is relevant to the NVidia situation since their software doesn't add features, it limits things the chip is already capable of. Just like Tesla won't let you run Comma.AI or something similar on their hardware...

This doesn't make sense at all. In your scenario you always pay for what you get. and developing additional features has a non-zero cost asociated with it (Unless you download software which targets unskilled consumers, Like Chessbase's Fritz engine which was essentially stockfish but 100$ instead of 0)

>Extra features cost money to implement. Companies want to be paid for it.

This doesn't make sense in your scenario either. You already have the sillicon with the 'advanced features' in your hands. The reason they lock the feature is so that you have to buy a more expensive card, with overpowered hardware that you dont need, in order to use a feature that all cards have if it weren't disabled. The only reasonable explanation you could have at this point that doesn't involve monopolistic practices to make more money (Nothing wrong with that) is that the development of the feature itself was so prohibitively expensive that it required consumers to pay for much higher margin cards in order to offset the development costs. Which is what's happening

>A company like Nvidia could decide to make 2 pieces of silicon, one with professional features and once without. Or they could disable it.

That would cost alot of money. all the more reasons why it might have been done to upsell more cards instead of offering quantitative improvements for a different price.

Yes. Who actually likes being segmented into markets? We want to pay a fair price for products instead of being exploited.

> If Nvidia enabled all their professional features on all gaming SKUs, the only reason to buy a professional SKU would be additional memory.

So what? A GPU is a GPU. It's all more or less the same thing. They would not have to lock down hardware features otherwise.

> Today, they make almost $1B per year in the professional non-datacenter business alone. There is no way they’d be able to compensate that revenue with volume (and gross margins would obviously tank as well, which makes Wall Street very unhappy.)

Who cares really. Pursuit of profit does not excuse bad behavior. They should lose money every time they do it.

Would you prefer if companies made 2 separate pieces of silicon designs, one with virtualization support in HW and one without, even if it would reduce their ability to work on advancing the state of the art due to wasted engineering resources?

Or would you prefer that all features are enabled all the time, but with the consequence that prices are raised by, say, 10% for everyone, even though 99% of customers don’t give a damn about these extra features?

I'm against "licenses" in general. If your software is running on my computer, I make the rules. If it's running on your server, you make the rules. It's very simple.

> do you have the same irrational belief that only products that include a HW component shouldn’t be allowed to charge for advanced features?

When I buy a thing, I expect it to perform to its full capacity. Nothing irrational about that.

> Would you prefer if companies made 2 separate pieces of silicon designs, one with virtualization support in HW and one without

Sure. At least then there would be real limitation rather than some made up illusion.

> even if it would reduce their ability to work on advancing the state of the art due to wasted engineering resources?

The real waste of engineering resources is all this software limiter crap. They shouldn't even be writing drivers in the first place. They're a hardware company, they should be making hardware and publishing documentation. Instead they're locking out open source developers, adding DRM to their cards and blocking workloads they don't like.

> Or would you prefer that all features are enabled all the time, but with the consequence that prices are raised by, say, 10% for everyone, even though 99% of customers don’t give a damn about these extra features?

That is how things are supposed to work, yes.

> Today, they make almost $1B per year in the professional non-datacenter business alone. There is no way they’d be able to compensate that revenue with volume (and gross margins would obviously tank as well, which makes Wall Street very unhappy.)

You're looking at it wrong. If Nvidia were to enable all features on their hardware, they wouldn't be giving up that additional revenue, they would instead have to create differentiated hardware with and without certain features.

Their costs would increase somewhat (as currently their professional SKUs enjoy some economies of scale by virtue of being lumped in with the higher-volume gaming SKUs), but it would hardly be the catastrophe you're describing. The pro market is large enough to enjoy it's own economies of scale, even if the hardware wasn't nearly identical (which it still would be).

It's currently impossible to find any nVidia GPU in stock because the demand far outstrips the supply.

Market segmentation is only helping their profit margins, not hurting it.

Also I have no doubt people will find other ways to unlock the hardware.

If the workaround results in enough money being left on the table, this might prompt 3rd party investment in open source drivers in order to keep the workaround available by eliminating the dependence on Nvidia's proprietary drivers.