jshap70

Joined 11 years ago

Karma
294
Submissions
68
Member since
Apr 6
software engineer at nvidia.

don't @ me w/ your driver problems, I probably have them too.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
DVI is a very large spec. It supports everything from pure VGA over it's analog pins as well as full fledged HDMI (its actually the other way around, HDMI is secretly just DVI). Finding monitors which support all of the simpler modes is an issue, whereas finding monitors which support old school VGA is fairly easy.
Comment · 6 years ago
the reason for the change to GPL in 5.9: https://lwn.net/Articles/827596/

it's a little frustrating that things which used to be kosher, like nvidia and nvidia_uvm linking are all of a sudden not because they got caught up in this crossfire.

Comment · 6 years ago
RISC-V is inherently a customizable ISA though, whereas ARM implementations are very specific about what they require to be called an "ARM processor". This wouldnt change from this acq.
Comment · 6 years ago
no. they're isolated for a reason, with the RISC-V processor being used as the controller to manage the behavior of the other parts of the chip. beyond just licensing ARM is expensive because it's required to implement a lot. With that chip being RISC-V they can make it as minimal and perfectly tuned as possible, so it's slow when it can afford to be cheap and fast when it needs to be.
Comment · 6 years ago
you do realize that Nvidia is a major backer of RISC-V and already uses it on GPU's Turing and newer?
Comment · 6 years ago
> GPUs are generally black boxes that you throw code at.

umm... what? what does that even mean? lol

I could kind of maybe begin understand your argument from the Graphics side, as users mostly interact with it at an API level, however keep in mind that shaders are languages the same way "cpu languages" work. It's all still compiled to assembly, and there's no reason that you couldn't make an open instruction set for a GPU the same as a CPU. This is especially obvious when it comes to Compute workloads, as you're probably just writing "regular code".

Now, that said, would it be a good idea? I don't really see the benefit. A barebones GPU ISA would be too stripped back to do anything at all, and one with the specific accelerations needed to be useful will always want to be kept under wraps.

Comment · 6 years ago
title makes it justifiable for systems to both be hard to modify and difficult to use
Comment · 7 years ago
I think so, but that issue was fixed w/in a few days
Comment · 7 years ago
You also inherit an entire chain of trust over code you yourself didn't write nor did anyone actually validate. The issue with leftpad.js wasn't that it was stupid, it was that it was dangerous.
Comment · 7 years ago
this is laughably hyperbolic
Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago
there's a really interesting story around Lauda Air flight 004 where Boeing attempted to write it off as pilot error but Niki Lauda basically threatened to go fly one himself and recreate the conditions as proof it was not. Eventually Boeing conceded and he didn't have to actually risk himself or another of his planes, but still an interesting anecdote.

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