OK, maybe you wouldn’t pay three grand for a Project DIGITS PC. But what about a $1,000 Blackwell PC from Acer, Asus, or Lenovo?
Besides, why not use native Linux as the primary operating system on this new chip family? Linux, after all, already runs on the Grace Blackwell Superchip. Windows doesn’t. It’s that simple.
Nowadays, Linux runs well with Nvidia chips. Recent benchmarks show that open-source Linux graphic drivers work with Nvidia GPUs as well as its proprietary drivers.
Even Linus Torvalds thinks Nvidia has gotten its open-source and Linux act together. In August 2023, Torvalds said, “Nvidia got much more involved in the kernel. Nvidia went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of companies who are doing really good work.”
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.