Nvidia Accuses Qualcomm Of Mobile Chip Monopoly; Demands Compensation For Unfair Practices - 352 milion $

[patrickjp93]

40 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

No, Nvidia did not make the better chip.

It was really hot

It was really power hungry

It was slow in instances where the code morphing failed to produce good code, or was skipped entirely (a great example of this is SunSpider).

The ISP was crap. Things like auto focus was much slower than competing chips for example.

It didn't have a modem, GPS, WiFi or bluetooth built in either so companies still needed to rely on Qualcomm, or Broadcom or some other company for that.

It did not have a DSP so everything had to be done on the CPU, and to make matters worse it did not have a LITTLE core either, so everything had to be done on the Denver cores (which were huge).

 

The K1 was shit. The only redeeming feature was the great GPU.

3-5W is too hot for tablets? No...

 

Nothing a little microcode and better compilers couldn't fix. Autofocus is entirely a function of the camera block. If the main part of the SOC is responsible for that, that's flawed design. Sorry but no.

 

And attaching modems is difficult or expensive how? The GPU could handle the DSP functions just fine. The huge cores were also incredibly power efficient and barely made up more than 30% of the chip's power usage.

 

It was an incredibly innovative, effective design that wiped the floor with the competition in nearly every benchmark. Sunspider isn't even trustworthy these days, so that result's not even worth quoting anymore. The benchmark (much like Geekbench) is so susceptible to dedicated hardware function units it's not even funny.

[Notional]

NVidia seems to be getting more and more desperate. Now for most in here, that might seem odd considering NVidia holds the vast majority of gaming cards, which is true. However from a long term perspective (which is what corporations focus on), things do not seem that good for NVidia:

 

• Intel pays about 1.5 billion $ for patents to make integrated graphics on their I series CPU's. Intel is now talking to AMD about licensing their patents instead, which would cost NVidia a LOT of money.
• Integrated graphics are slowly eating away at the discrete graphics market as well, thus cornering NVidia in the high end of the market. But as integrated graphics get better at gaming and so on, so does the need for a discrete graphics card diminish (this includes laptops as well). AMD is not affected by this due to their APU's, which might even capture larger parts of the market with i5 like ZEN APU's, that can play all modern games at moderate settings. Enough to play games for most. After all the average gaming computer is quite weak according to Steam hardware survey.
• NVidia has zero influence on the console market. AMD has PS4, XBone, Nintendo NX, PS4.5 and probably PS5 and Xbox2. We are slowly seeing AMD setting the course of the entire gaming industry, which we have seen with async compute. A direct consequence of the consoles (which have used that for many years), mantle, DX12 and Vulkan being heavily based on Mantle. As such AMD's architecture seem to be better at being future proof.

The reason why I think NVidia is acting desperately is furthermore due to their business strategies:

• Sue huge companies (similar in size to Intel) to gain huge licensing income without doing any work.
• Focus on proprietary solutions, thus giving them an unhealthy leg up (Gsync, GameWorks, etc.).
• Use these solutions to create vendor lock in, which distorts and sabotages normal competition. This is mainly due to high switching costs. Say you bought a brand new expensive Gsync monitor. You want to keep that for a few generations of graphics cards. Well now you are stuck with NVidia, even if they have much worse price to performance, bad drivers, etc. Otherwise you will miss out on the Gsync functionality you paid a hefty 1-200$ price premium for, or you will have to get a new monitor all together.
• Planned obsolescence. By focusing on getting performance through driver optimizations, rather than powerful hardware, they can slowly wind down performance on older generations. How are things on a 680 compared to a 7970 today? 290 versus 780? It does not look good. Blowing up the tessellation factor in GameWorks to hit your opposition as well as your older cards, to make your own customers shell out more often.
• NVidia's focus on niche projects like AI or car computers. This one is a good move and makes sense. But it also shows a company that knows it's heavily pressured in it's core markets.

---

People continue to talk about AMD going down financially. I personally think that NVidia is much more in the risk zone on the long run. It is much more likely that Intel buys NVidia than AMD.

[patrickjp93]

32 minutes ago, Shahnewaz said:

The accusation that Qualcomm is engaging in anti-competitive practices is straight out of Nvidia's mouth. So were the claims that Nvidia invented the GPU, and Qualcomm and Samsung were infringing their GPU patents, none of which stood in court. We'll have to wait and see what Nvidia is claiming is actually true or not.

 

What I think is that Nvidia is now acting like a crybaby, and instead of looking at how their incompetence with Tegra led to the demise of their mobile business, they are blaming Qualcomm for whatever they can. Oh well .

Many SOC makers have said similar things before. Let's see this play out in court before we come to our own biased conclusions, shall we?

[patrickjp93]

14 minutes ago, ElfFriend said:

Wait Nvidia, the company that basically has a monopoly in the gpu market, is suing another company for having a monopoly as well? Why would they do that?

 

Since if they win, then this case may be used against them if someone sues them for having a monopoly, and if they lose then they lose but at least nobody would be able to use this case against them. What the heck is Nvidia doing... maybe by losing horribly they may be able to make it harder for themselves to get sued for having a monopoly but otherwise I really fail to see how this can benefit them.

That is not how precedence works, especially since Nvidia's accusation is predatory pricing, an anti-competitive practice. Being a monopoly in and of itself is not illegal in most countries around the world. Abuse of market dominant positions is illegal and is codified in anti-trust lust.

 

9 minutes ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

Dunno why Nvidia's talking.

They're the last motherfuckers to be pointing fingers. Rough reality is, you buy your way into stardom or tough tits, Nvidia. You know this by now.

It's illegal to buy the maintenance of that stardom though. If there is evidence, Qualcomm could see the same trust busting that happened to Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel.

 

6 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

what about nintendo or nvidia even with their shield android tv

Nintendo makes profits on its consoles. I don't know about the Shield product lines, but I'm guessing there's profit.

[spartaman64]

1 minute ago, patrickjp93 said:

That is not how precedence works, especially since Nvidia's accusation is predatory pricing, an anti-competitive practice. Being a monopoly in and of itself is not illegal in most countries around the world. Abuse of market dominant positions is illegal and is codified in anti-trust lust.

 

It's illegal to buy the maintenance of that stardom though. If there is evidence, Qualcomm could see the same trust busting that happened to Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel.

 

Nintendo makes profits on its consoles. I don't know about the Shield product lines, but I'm guessing there's profit.

im asking if nintendo or nvidia can sue sony and microsoft

[PlayStation 2]

1 minute ago, patrickjp93 said:

It's illegal to buy the maintenance of that stardom though. If there is evidence, Qualcomm could see the same trust busting that happened to Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel.

I'd mention Donald Trump, but that's probably a different path neither of us wanna go down.

[patrickjp93]

Just now, spartaman64 said:

im asking if nintendo or nvidia can sue sony and microsoft

No, especially since PS4 and XBOne both turn a profit with every sale. If they'd launched back with the PS3 and XBox 360, maybe.

[patrickjp93]

1 minute ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

I'd mention Donald Trump, but that's probably a different path.

That's blackmail and shell games without a doubt. As to proving it...

[LAwLz]

24 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

3-5W is too hot for tablets? No...

It was not 3-5 watts. The power consumption of the K1 peaked at around 11 watts, and the TDP was somewhere around 5 to 8 watts.

Also, we were not talking about tablets specifically. In fact, this lawsuit is more about phones since it has to do with modems (something not many tablets has, but all phones do).

 

24 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

Nothing a little microcode and better compilers couldn't fix. Autofocus is entirely a function of the camera block. If the main part of the SOC is responsible for that, that's flawed design. Sorry but no.

Which part are you referring to? The part about low performance? It's not that simple. First of all, things like JavaScript are not compiled. You can't just "compile them better" to fix the issues. Secondly, it was on purpose that Nvidia did not always use code morphing. In some cases the ARM code just didn't map very well to their own instruction set, and in some cases the morphing part would end up taking longer than executing the actual code (which is why Nvidia made it so that Denver could run native ARM code, but it avoids it as much as possible because it ends up being really slow).

 

The auto focus part? In these chips the ISP is part of the SoC, and no it is not something a firmware upgrade can fix. The actual hardware which controls the camera was significantly worse than in competing SoCs like Snapdragon. On top of that, things the ISP could not do had to be done on the CPU or GPU because the Tegra K1 did not have any DSP or other co-processor, unlike Snapdragon chips.

I totally agree that the K1 was designed poorly.

 

24 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

And attaching modems is difficult how? The GPU could handle the DSP functions just fine.

When did I say attaching a modem was hard? It's not, but it does end up taking up a lot more space and costs more than competing solutions which had everything on a single die.

 

The GPU could probably handle quite a few of the things the DSP handled, but at higher power usage. Also, don't quote me on this but I am fairly sure the DSP in Snapdragon chips can do things the GPU can't. For example audio playback is handled by that, allowing both the CPU and GPU to fully shut down when you for example listen to music with your phone in your pocket. It saves a ton of power.

 

 

24 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

It was an incredibly innovative, effective design that wiped the floor with the competition in nearly every benchmark. Sunspider isn't even trustworthy these days, so that result's not even worth quoting anymore. The benchmark (much like Geekbench) is so susceptible to dedicated hardware function units it's not even funny.

"It was amazing! Don't bring up benchmarks where it was bad please."

Ohh Patrick... It had the same issues in Kraken for your information. Are you going to say Kraken is bad too?

 

 

Also, can you please stop making multiple posts in a row? It is possible to quote several people in the same post.

[Sors]

This just reminds me of all the gameworks "optimizations" that make AMD GPUs performance drop, for no good reason other than to make Nvidia look good.

 

"How does the shoe fit when is on the other foot"

[Beskamir]

25 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

That is not how precedence works, especially since Nvidia's accusation is predatory pricing, an anti-competitive practice. Being a monopoly in and of itself is not illegal in most countries around the world. Abuse of market dominant positions is illegal and is codified in anti-trust lust.

 

It's illegal to buy the maintenance of that stardom though. If there is evidence, Qualcomm could see the same trust busting that happened to Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel.

 

Nintendo makes profits on its consoles. I don't know about the Shield product lines, but I'm guessing there's profit.

So when Nvidia forces us to install geforce experience to update our gpu's drivers it's somehow not considered abuse of their monopoly?

[Shahnewaz]

46 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

Many SOC makers have said similar things before. Let's see this play out in court before we come to our own biased conclusions, shall we?

Not saying Nvidia is the first one to cry foul of a situation like this. It's abundantly clear Qualcomm's mobile chips are leagues ahead of Nvidia's offerings; and given Nvidia's history of lies and deceptive tactics, I'd be hard pressed to believe what they're saying is true.

Just making my predictions based on what we have so far. We all know how the previous lawsuit turned out for Nvidia, right?

[FruitBasketSilex]

2 hours ago, patrickjp93 said:

I have exactly the right law(s). That which applies to "Predatory Pricing" is what applies in this case. And that is a specific area of anti-trust law.

Ah. Welp, my only experience with anti-trust and monopoly stuff is high school social studies.

[Dabombinable]

1 hour ago, spartaman64 said:

what about nintendo or nvidia even with their shield android tv

Look at the hardware they use, they see a straight profit.

[Energycore]

Nvidia crying for unfair practices.

 

I died.

[Dabombinable]

14 minutes ago, Energycore said:

Nvidia crying for unfair practices.

 

I died.

Its quite fair that AMD went full retard on the CPU side of things and dragged down the GPU side of things (that and Ati was bought for more than it was worth, and while it had a significant debt).

[Energycore]

1 minute ago, Dabombinable said:

Its quite fair that AMD went full retard on the CPU side of things and dragged down the GPU side of things (that and Ati was bought for more than it was worth, and while it had a significant debt).

It's not like AMD can't be blamed for losing that much marketshare. I stumbled upon an article from 2011 that reported AMD firing their CEO that had done very well to put them back on the market because he "wasn't being agressive enough". Linky http://anandtech.com/show/4123/what-a-day-amds-ceo-dirk-meyer-resigns

 

But it's the same nvidia that abuses their big dGPU marketshare with stuff like gameworks that now is asking for compensation because they weren't allowed into a this other market. I guess it shouldn't come to a surprise that a corporation that big is above all semblance of morality.

[Dabombinable]

4 minutes ago, Energycore said:

It's not like AMD can't be blamed for losing that much marketshare. I stumbled upon an article from 2011 that reported AMD firing their CEO that had done very well to put them back on the market because he "wasn't being agressive enough". Linky http://anandtech.com/show/4123/what-a-day-amds-ceo-dirk-meyer-resigns

 

But it's the same nvidia that abuses their big dGPU marketshare with stuff like gameworks that now is asking for compensation because they weren't allowed into a this other market. I guess it shouldn't come to a surprise that a corporation that big is above all semblance of morality.

That's not Nvidia abusing anything, that's game devs deciding to use the best tools available to do their job (and using them poorly in some cases).

[shdowhunt60]

If nVidia actually fucking tried, maybe Qualcomm wouldn't be as dominant as it is today. The Tegra chips could've been something, but no, they just threw out maybe one or two devices and then sat on their thumbs afterwords.

 

And no, Qualcomm doesn't have a monopoly. Mediatek and Kirin are still very much things.

[patrickjp93]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

It was not 3-5 watts. The power consumption of the K1 peaked at around 11 watts, and the TDP was somewhere around 5 to 8 watts.

Also, we were not talking about tablets specifically. In fact, this lawsuit is more about phones since it has to do with modems (something not many tablets has, but all phones do).

 

Which part are you referring to? The part about low performance? It's not that simple. First of all, things like JavaScript are not compiled. You can't just "compile them better" to fix the issues. Secondly, it was on purpose that Nvidia did not always use code morphing. In some cases the ARM code just didn't map very well to their own instruction set, and in some cases the morphing part would end up taking longer than executing the actual code (which is why Nvidia made it so that Denver could run native ARM code, but it avoids it as much as possible because it ends up being really slow).

 

The auto focus part? In these chips the ISP is part of the SoC, and no it is not something a firmware upgrade can fix. The actual hardware which controls the camera was significantly worse than in competing SoCs like Snapdragon. On top of that, things the ISP could not do had to be done on the CPU or GPU because the Tegra K1 did not have any DSP or other co-processor, unlike Snapdragon chips.

I totally agree that the K1 was designed poorly.

 

When did I say attaching a modem was hard? It's not, but it does end up taking up a lot more space and costs more than competing solutions which had everything on a single die.

 

The GPU could probably handle quite a few of the things the DSP handled, but at higher power usage. Also, don't quote me on this but I am fairly sure the DSP in Snapdragon chips can do things the GPU can't. For example audio playback is handled by that, allowing both the CPU and GPU to fully shut down when you for example listen to music with your phone in your pocket. It saves a ton of power.

 

 

"It was amazing! Don't bring up benchmarks where it was bad please."

Ohh Patrick... It had the same issues in Kraken for your information. Are you going to say Kraken is bad too?

 

 

Also, can you please stop making multiple posts in a row? It is possible to quote several people in the same post.

Under HPC-style workloads (full-tilt GPU with full-tilt vector processors on the CPU cores too). No one gives a damn when the average is 4W! And no, the TDP, rated for the maximum of the average cases, is and was 5W.

 

An interpreter is just a lightweight compiler that organizes/optimizes code in real time. Every language that ever goes down to machine instructions is compiled AT SOME POINT.

 

No, the design was great.

 

A modem is a modem is a modem (spectrum coverage being the main distinguishing point). Most of them are no larger than the head of small nail. Adding them to a socket on the mainboard takes practically no extra space than it would have being directly integrated into the SOC.

 

I was on my phone. Live with it. It will happen.

59 minutes ago, shdowhunt60 said:

If nVidia actually fucking tried, maybe Qualcomm wouldn't be as dominant as it is today. The Tegra chips could've been something, but no, they just threw out maybe one or two devices and then sat on their thumbs afterwords.

 

And no, Qualcomm doesn't have a monopoly. Mediatek and Kirin are still very much things.

2 hours ago, ElfFriend said:

So when Nvidia forces us to install geforce experience to update our gpu's drivers it's somehow not considered abuse of their monopoly?

1) It doesn't. You can download standalone drivers.

2) It wouldn't be even if Nvidia did.

 

2 hours ago, Shahnewaz said:

Not saying Nvidia is the first one to cry foul of a situation like this. It's abundantly clear Qualcomm's mobile chips are leagues ahead of Nvidia's offerings; and given Nvidia's history of lies and deceptive tactics, I'd be hard pressed to believe what they're saying is true.

Just making my predictions based on what we have so far. We all know how the previous lawsuit turned out for Nvidia, right?

No, Qualcomm's chips are borderline competitive with Nvidia's best offerings, at least for the tablet space. For phones, fine, maybe Lawlz is right for once, but I doubt it. Patent trolling is one thing, but turning the eyes of the regulators directly on Qualcomm and crying "anti trust" leaves grounds for counter suits for public defamation, and those could get very expensive. Nvidia should not and I doubt did throw this accusation lightly.

 

59 minutes ago, shdowhunt60 said:

If nVidia actually fucking tried, maybe Qualcomm wouldn't be as dominant as it is today. The Tegra chips could've been something, but no, they just threw out maybe one or two devices and then sat on their thumbs afterwords.

 

And no, Qualcomm doesn't have a monopoly. Mediatek and Kirin are still very much things.

Nvidia produced the objectively better SOCs. And Mediatek, Huawei (Kirin), Rockchip, Nvidia, and Intel combined have less than a 10% share of the open-air phone SOC market in the U.S. (Apple and Samsung only put their own chips in their own phones, so they don't matter in this discussion). Qualcomm is the definition of a monopoly. Monopolies can have competition. If you don't know your definitions, shut up until you do. And Intel is looking to possibly join this lawsuit as another victim of Qualcomm's abusive pricing (which is saying something since Intel practically gave away its Atoms for free which score significantly better in benchmarks that aren't rigged like Geekbench whose x86 branch hasn't been updated or well-maintained for years)

[GauntletV2]

7 hours ago, Kobathor said:

 

 

Hey genius, did you read the 1st part, because of amd's bad decisions, AND their share currently, nvidia and intel do not have monopolies, they're close, but not there yet.

[Monte_Carlo]

Is Nvidia stupid?  I mean... sure... Qualcomm is a monopoly if you ignore Apple's in house designs, Huawei, Samsung, Mediatek, AMD to an extent, LG, Broadcom, Rockchip, and many many more.  If anything, it almost feels as if Qualcomm's market-share is slowly eroding, especially after the fairly Snapdragon 810 chip.  Nvidia should probably spend more money on R&D for their ARM chips, and less on bitching about what other people do better.  

 

Frankly, Nvidia's position in the market isn't going to get any better considering Apple, Huawei, Apple, and Samsung all have in house chips with LG supposedly working on their own. With MediaTek pushing in from the bottom and Qualcomm dominating the top... Nvidia would probably have better chances just licensing their GPU stuff out to other makers.  

 

[Curufinwe_wins]

9 hours ago, ivan134 said:

If there is anyone well versed in financial law, is selling your products below their actual worth illegal?

In some situations yes (although not in a this is against the law, but rather this is in breach of overarching contracts, which is against the law).

 

For example the JEDEC standards (among many) explicitly prevent companies from selling the same memory silicon at different prices to different OEMs.

 

This was a big deal with the whole HBM discussion. By contract law, Nvidia and AMD must pay the exact same price for the same HBM chips. This could cause a conflict because say Nvidia wanted to move to all HBM. This drives up demand and then price increases dramatically. Nvidia might be willing (all things equal) to pay 50% more for memory if AMD has to as well because it hurts AMD's bottom line far more (Nvidia makes way more per gpu.)

 

This is also the reason why AMD can't be given HBM(2) at any discount even though they helped develop it.

[MMKing]

5 hours ago, ElfFriend said:

So when Nvidia forces us to install geforce experience to update our gpu's drivers it's somehow not considered abuse of their monopoly?

You wot mate?

http://www.geforce.com/drivers

[Shahnewaz]

2 hours ago, patrickjp93 said:

No, Qualcomm's chips are borderline competitive with Nvidia's best offerings, at least for the tablet space. For phones, fine, maybe Lawlz is right for once, but I doubt it. Patent trolling is one thing, but turning the eyes of the regulators directly on Qualcomm and crying "anti trust" leaves grounds for counter suits for public defamation, and those could get very expensive. Nvidia should not and I doubt did throw this accusation lightly.

Borderline competitive? How many design wins Nvidia have for their Tegra chips compared to Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips? And how many are tablets anyway?

Because @LAwLz was right about his criticisms. Tegra was hot and power hungry, when demoed at CES 2014. Charlie got to take a look at the demo board itself, and it confirms what LAwLz was claiming: http://semiaccurate.com/2014/03/05/nvidias-tegra-k1-draws-shocking-number-watts/

AnandTech also got their hands on the board, and they confirmed its absurdly high power consumption way before Charlie: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7169/nvidia-demonstrates-logan-soc-mobile-kepler/2

Bonus: The jetson TK1 board uses active cooling to keep a tablet processor cool: http://elinux.org/Jetson_TK1

You'd think that after 8 months, they had their problems fixed, but nope.

Adding more salt to the wounds are Joel Hruska and John Carmack:

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/177002-john-carmack-suspicious-of-nvidias-outlandish-tegra-k1-claims

And then Samsung went as far as counter-suing them for falsely representing the performance of the Tegra K1: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/11/11/nvidia-responds-to-samsung/

 

Anyways, sales, design wins and volume matter after everything. And why would anyone choose Denver, when right around the same time, the 20nm Snapdragon 810 became available? (And Samsung would only use their SoCs regardless, except their US devices.) Not only Denver looked slower, more power hungry and outdated, but nobody would pick a particularly weird and sup-optimal processor design: http://www.androidauthority.com/tegra-k1-exynos-5433-snap-805-541582/

Quote

Nvidia’s latest Tegra K1 implementation matches the 2.5GHz clock speeds of the Snapdragons, but is a much stranger beast. The Denver CPU architecture is more of a high-performance general purpose CPU that works like an interpreter for the ARMv8 code-base. While this sounds suboptimal in terms of performance, Nvidia has fitted its Denver CPU cores with a large 128MB memory cache to store optimized code in.

 

The Nexus 9’s CPU operates a little differently to typical smartphone processors.

 

Nvidia calls this process Dynamic Code Optimization and it works with all ARM-based applications. The processor stores the most commonly used instructions and places them into a highly optimized order, potentially resulting in big performance gains for your most commonly used applications. However if the code isn’t in the memory pool, the processor has to process the ARM instructions itself, which might actually slow performance down compared with a dedicated ARM processor.

 

To combat this issue, the Denver CPU is implements a 7-way superscalar microarchitecture, allowing for 7 instructions to be complete led per clock cycle. This is a lot more throughput than your typical ARM processor, but come with the drawback that it takes up additional energy and a lot of die space, hence why there’s only a dual-core implementation of Denver available right now.

 

Essentially, Nvidia has attempted to build higher performance processor than its competitors through a combination of pure power and attempting to optimise commonly used instructions. However, this comes with its own trade-offs in the forms of inefficient emulation, power consumption, and a larger processor size.

The Nexus 9 is the only tablet that sported Nvidia's Denver cores to this date.

 

Even Nvidia themselves called quits with Denver after the Tegra K1. The Tegra X1 sports just plain ARM CPU cores: http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-x1-processor.html

 

In retrospect, Nvidia was the one who came borderline competitive with their Denver K1 offerings, but got immediately trounced by far superior solutions from Qualcomm.

 

Nvidia didn't throw their previous accusations lightly too. In fact, they went straight for the class action lawsuit with their previous claims, in comparison to court and press conference complaints about how Qualcomm is doing this and that. That is a way bolder move than this one, and even that bolder move didn't bode well in court. I have reasons to doubt them, and so do everyone else.