From The Register
Nvidia has banned the use of its GeForce and Titan gaming graphics cards in data centers – forcing organizations to fork out for more expensive gear, like its latest Tesla V100 chips.Read more: https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2018/01/03/nvidia_server_gpus/The chip-design giant updated its GeForce and Titan software licensing in the past few days, adding a new clause that reads: “No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.”
In other words, if you wanted to bung a bunch of GeForce GPUs into a server box and use them to accelerate math-heavy software – such as machine learning, simulations and analytics – then, well, you can't without breaking your licensing agreement with Nvidia. Unless you're doing trendy blockchain stuff.
A copy of the license in the Google cache, dated December 31, 2017, shows no mention of the data center ban. Open the page today, and, oh look, data center use is verboten.
To be precise, the controversial end-user license agreement (EULA) terms cover the drivers for Nvidia's GeForce GTX and Titan graphics cards. However, without Nvidia's proprietary drivers, you can't unlock the full potential of the hardware, so Nv has you over a barrel.
It's not just a blow for people building their own servers and data centers, it's a blow for any computer manufacturer – such as HPE or Dell – that hoped to flog GPU-accelerated servers, using GTX or Titan hardware, much cheaper than Nvidia charges for, say, its expensive DGX family of GPU-accelerated servers. A DGX-1 with Tesla V100 chips costs about $150,000 from Nvidia. A GeForce or Titan-powered box would cost much less albeit with much less processing power.
The high-end GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards – aimed at gamers rather than deep-learning data scientists – uses Nv's Pascal architecture, and only costs $699 (~£514) a pop. Meanwhile, the latest Tesla V100 card that's flogged to data centers costs over $9,000 (~£6,620).
Hopefully this move will help ease the shortage that miners are currently facing. Also there is an exemption in this NVidia license change specifically to protect cryptocurrency processing. That's right! They left in an exemption just for us. I like that NVidia made this move to help cryptocurrency miners and gamers out. I'm glad I decided to build an NVidia rig over AMD. After my last GPUs arrive and I get everything assembled I'll make to take some photos and make a post.
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