This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Don't get too excited -- if this goes like the last few NVidia hardware, it will:
Go talk to all the Jetson owners out there and see how happy they are with NVidia Linux boxes. I'll believe it when I see it (and when it is supported for longer than a quarter)
*monkey paw closes*
But it's just for AI bullshit.
I don't care why they got their shit together, I'm happy as long as they fix the open source drivers.
Linux, after all, already runs on the Grace Blackwell Superchip. Windows doesn’t.
And why is that?
Project DIGITS features the new NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, offering a petaflop of AI computing performance for prototyping, fine-tuning and running large AI models.
With the Grace Blackwell architecture, enterprises and researchers can prototype, fine-tune and test models on local Project DIGITS systems running Linux-based NVIDIA DGX OS, and then deploy them seamlessly on NVIDIA DGX Cloud™, accelerated cloud instances or data center infrastructure.
Oh, because it's not a fucking consumer product. It's for enterprises that need a cheap supercomputer
Or you can just buy any random potato computer (or assemble it yourself from stuff you found) and still run Linux on it.
Haven't they been making things like the Jetson AGX for years? I guess this is an announcement of the next generation.
I'm planning on getting new pc soon. I was planning on avoiding nvidia because i had read it might be more difficult to get drivers. Does this mean they are going to improve things in general or just for the newest and likely most expensive stuff? I dont want to buy the newest possible gpu since they always have bloated price for being new and a bit older ones are likely decent enough too.
Nvidia drivers on Linux are messy and have been for a long time. It took them ages to fix Vsync in Wayland. If you want to run Linux, go AMD (or Intel).
I was planning on getting some amd gpu. Are there any other components that might have similar issues? I want to build this pc specificially for linux
Not really, everything else should just work. At least if you don't plan to buy an obscure USB sound card or something like that 😄
Have fun!
Not Acer. I’ve been burnt by them too much in the past.
Don't forget those who made it happen. Nvidia was "forced" to integrate Linux into its ecosystem
Nvidia has always been hostile to the Linux community or negligent to say the least
Nvidia was "forced" to integrate Linux into its ecosystem
100% bullcrap.
Nvidia's servers for data processing have always run Linux. And you know what those servers run? It's not Windows, that's for sure. So why would they write multiple versions of a driver for the same hardware interface? Their servers use the same drivers that you would use for gaming on a Linux desktop system.
In fact, no version of Windows is supported on their DGX servers, and AFAIK you can't even install Windows on it (even if you managed, it wouldn't be usable).
Long story short, a vendor we were working with (about 6 or 7 years ago now), was working on their Linux version of their SDK. We wanted to do some preliminary testing on Nvidia's new T4s that at this point were only available via Nvidia's testing datacenter (which we had access to).
During a call with some of the Nvidia engineers I had to ask the awkward question of "any chance there's a Windows server we can test on?". I knew it was a cringe question and I died a little during the 10 second silence until one of the Nvidia guys finally replied with "no one uses Windows for this stuff". And he said it slowly like the reply to such a question needed to go slow to be understood, because who else would ask that question unless you're slow in the head?
Nvidia has always been hostile to the Linux community or negligent to say the least
People say "hostile", but I think a better word is arrogant. They wanted to force the industry to use their own implementations they owned or pioneered like egl-stream instead of open standards. But AMD and Intel have proven that open source graphics drivers not only work, but benefit from being open so that the community can scratch their own itches and fix issues faster.
Yep, Nvidia has never been hostile towards Linux, they benefit from supporting it. They just don't care to support the desktop that much, and frankly neither do AMD or Intel. They often take an extremely long time to fix simple bugs that only effect desktop usage. Fortunately, in their case, the drivers can be fixed by other open source contributors.
Man, I completely forgot about that. That's honestly wild to think about in retrospect...
It's not. It had nothing to do with it. Nvidia was all in with Linux as soon as they realized their hardware could be used for data processing and AI. That realization was way more than a decade ago.
their drivers were good for AI and compute way before the leak.
but suddenly their desktop drivers are open, after hackers leaked their desktop driver code? mmmmmmm...
They only open sourced the kernel drivers, which just makes sense for them to do. Userspace drivers, which these attackers wanted to be open, are still very much closed. Likely had nothing to do with it.
there is a userspace driver being worked into nouveau as we speak that is supposed to replace the closed userspace driver we are currently using as the official setup.
turns out the kernel driver + the documentation they published was what we needed.
That's true, but its still not nvidia making that, so it's a bit of a different thing. It will never support certain things like CUDA. It is really cool though and wouldve never happened without the open kernel modules.
Am I missing something here? Nvidia never caved to their demands IIRC
Don't know about "always." In recent years, like the past 10 years, definitely. But I remember a time when Nvidia was the only reasonable recommendation for a graphics card on Linux, because Radeon was so bad. This was before Wayland, and probably even before AMD bought ATI. And it was certainly long before the amdgpu drivers existed.
Cant load the article. Does it mention if this will be ARM computers?
Where's the PC? Is it the brick on the desk? 🤣
But... Why make it so ugly?
I actually think it looks neat.
The mock-up looks much cooler than the actual device in the photo (assuming that's actually it and not just a render or something).
The one in the photo looks like they cobbled it together from an old cardboard box.
Yeah and stuck a bunch of gold glitter on it with Elmer's glue.
Honestly, I've found that my compute needs have been surpassed quite a while ago, and so I could easily get away with buying a $300 computer.
Honestly, for real, a lot of low-power PCs are really useful once they have crap like Windows off of them and a lightweight Linux distro on them.
Well, it's still a modified custom distro and other distros will need to invest extra effort to be able to run there. So, no actual freedom of choice for users again...
