Posted on Thursday, June 21 2012 @ 23:01 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bright Side of News
heard rumors that NVIDIA was picked by a Chinese CPU team to be featured in a pilot school PC project that would include upward of 10 million PCs, basically 100,000 schools with 100-150 PCs each. These systems would feature a Chinese CPU, a GeForce GPU for graphics and the Linux operating system, but NVIDIA reportedly lost the deal because of their unwillingness to release source code for its Linux drivers and their refusal to work together with the Chinese CPU team without a multi-million dollar incentive.
A rumor appeared from the heart of Beijing that, due to the performance of its GPU architecture and its Linux drivers, NVIDIA was approached by one of the leading Chinese CPU teams to use an NV GPU in a pilot school PC project here with their CPU would Linux, while GeForce GPU would provide the graphics power. Pilot project here means upward of 10 MILLION PCs in one order, basically - count 100,000 schools with 100-150 PCs each. The problem was two-fold; NVIDIA never releases source code for its Linux drivers, the binaries are only X86. On incentive of the Chinese government , the Chinese CPU team called NV to come to China and work together.
To cut the story short, the NV team appeared there, and in very arrogant manner told the Chinese side that they are big US co and whatever, and that recompiling the Linux drivers will cost the Chinese a lots of money to pay. The money that Chinese CPU team, and the Academy of Science were supposed to fork out was to the tune of several millions of dollars in incentive that is typically called NRE - Non-recurring Engineering.
BSN claims the GPU deal is now going to AMD.
