Consumer harm = selling their graphics cards at outrageous prices by keeping supply low and reducing the OS support for them by making Linux drivers crap.
Then again, it never "required" consumer harm as far as I've read.
It's circular the way it was described. Seems like Linux servers are fine with Nvidia GPUs for ML training, but not for graphics, which is more applicable to Linux desktops.
This is not true and very ignorant. Linux has huge marketshare especially across server space where NVidia cards are used also. Furthermore plenty of people run Linux desktops that would be affected by this.
Consumer harm comes when there is intention to control consumer choice. Since Linux isn’t the biggest platform, but a major choice: It is therefor harmful for Nvidia to not support it properly.
> Linux has huge marketshare especially across server space where NVidia cards are used also
Consumers don't generally rent server space. It would be difficult to establish consumer harm on the basis of server prices.
> Furthermore plenty of people run Linux desktops that would be affected by this
Right, this is the insignificant bit. Inconveniencing 2 or 3% of the market is not a valid antitrust claim [1][2].
> Consumer harm comes when there is intention to control consumer choice
No, it comes when you can prove prices were raised, output reduced, innovation diminished or customers were "otherwise harmed" [3]. To the degree intent is considered in the enabling case, it's in reading the intent of the Congress, not the defendant [4].
Output has been scarce for NVIDIA gpu's for quite some time. Often not even being able to support the demand for their cards. NVIDIA is a trillion dollar company right now. There should be no reason why they are restricting access to their reference cards and not able to support demand.
You are also not counting handheld use such as the Steamdeck. There is a reason Steamdeck doesn't use NVIDIA graphics.
Consumers do rent server space and prices were manipulated, because they could control consumer choice. It’s all done for the control of the consumer, hence the antitrust.
All those Linux servers using Nvidia cards must be getting good enough support from Nvidia for what they need to do, otherwise they wouldn't use it.
GNU/Linux desktop is a different story. Yes it's accurate to say that's an insignificant market share. And I said "GNU" to differentiate from the most popular Linux desktop OS, ChromeOS.
So you’re just looking to isolate consumers so you can make a point. Linux users aren’t insignificant regardless how you roll the dice and want them to be. We push more technology forward than non-Linux users. The insignificance is just something Macos and Windows users tell themselves to feel good about their desire to dislike Linux as they spin up LXC containers.
They're different use cases from the industry's perspective. Nvidia supports GPU compute on Linux very well, but graphics not so much.
I'm not interested in the OS fan wars and neither is Nvidia, but if you want to consider Linux server users the same as Linux desktop users instead of isolating them, you can count me on that side. I have an RPi, a PowerEdge, an Android phone, and yes an Alpine Linux Docker container on my Mac.
I would be surprised if more than a small minority of consumers using CUDA ran anything other Linux. I would like it if I wasn't forced to use their crap drivers that force me to use X just because I want to do some ML.
I understand antitrust law enough to know that "mad I can't game on Linux" is an anti-competitive measure.
As far as what I read about the driver stack, they only recently (within a year) release source for kernel modules. They did not open source the whole stack. And these are only new modules in an alpha state.
Its basically the bare minimum.
Most people aren't running ML on their workstations and these mostly use entirely different types of cards.
I had to use a bleeding edge live mint ISO yesterday because the regular release ISO gave me a black screen on my 3099z. Nvidia drivers continue to be my #1 Linux paint point aside from windows apps that don’t run on wine due to DRM/anticheats.
I'm not sure what world you live in, but Nvidia sells their cards at 1.5 - 2 times the price than AMD's on average and AMD has had strong Linux support for years.
When AMD can run 95% of games as good as any NVIDIA card and you factor in that most games have virtually no ray tracing support or any other fancy feature that NVIDIA offers, coupled with the known low performance/cost gains in their own graphics family, and their lack of ability to support demand despite being a trillion dollar company, I'd say that there isn't much of a leg to stand on.
It would be anti-trust if they were deliberately shrinking supply to hike up prices on their cards.
For example, I know I have the best card in the industry, so I'm going to force the supply low so I can charge effectively whatever I want.
Nvidia and AMD (previously ATI) have had a similar relationship for a long time, before ML was a use case. Nvidia has always been the more expensive option afaik. Kinda like Intel vs AMD.
It wasn't in the 2000's back when ATI and NVIDIA cards had comparable prices. Sometimes ATI cost a little more because they were better, but they were never crazy different from NVIDIA.
And there were never supply problems.
Then again, it never "required" consumer harm as far as I've read.