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.”
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?
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.