If by working with everyone meant stepping back and relenting in every possible way then Nvidia would not be profitable. I am not sure why Microsoft felt they were entitled to Nvidia. And Nvidia just said no. It was that simple.
Nvidia wants to protect their business Interest, and that is what business is all about. And yet everyone on the internet seems to think company should do open source or throw resources into it etc.
I am just pointing out that Nvidia's evident opinion on how to run a business (their corporate culture) is not in line with cultivating an open ecosystem like ARM is running. And the cultivation of this ecosystem is ARM's key to success here. Nvidia is entitled how to run a business how they want, but I'm very much hoping that that way of working does not translate to how they will run ARM.
People everywhere in this thread are having huge difficulty separating the point "Nvidia's way of doing business does not match ARM's" with "I have personal beef with Nvidia's way of doing business". I'm trying to make the former argument.
> That is just not true.
Out of curiosity - what isn't true here? Am I missing facts, or are you expressing disagreement with my reading of the business situation? If the latter is based on some understanding I have some personal beef with Nvidia, then please reconsider.
Xbox: The Xbox's security was broken, and Nvidia apaprently took the high road, claimed a loss on all existing chips in the supply chain (claiming a loss fo the quarter out of nowhere and tanking their stock for a bit) and allowed Microsoft to ship a new initial boot ROM as quickly as possible for a minimum of cost to Microsoft. When that new mask ROM was cracked within a week of release Microsoft went back to Nvidia looking for the same deal and Nvidia apparently told them to pound sand and in fact said that they would be doing no additional work on these chips, not even die shrinks (hence why there was no OG Xbox Slim). There are other reasons why Microsoft felt like Nvidia still owed them albeit, but it was a bit of a toxic relationship for everyone involved.
PS3: they were never supposed to be the GPU until the eleventh hour. The Cell was supposed to originally crank up to 5GHz (one of the first casualties of the end of Dennard scaling, and how it affected Moore's law as we conceived it) and there were supposed to be two Cell processors in the original design, and no dedicated GPU. When that fell through and they could only crank them up to 3.2GHz, they made a deal with Nvidia at the last second to create a core with an new bus interconnect to attach to the Cell. And that chip was very close to the state of the art from Nvidia. Most of it's problems were centered around duck taping in a discrete PC GPU into the console with time running out on the clock, and don't think that anyone else would have been able to deliver a better solution under those circumstances.
Like I said, Nvidia is a scummy company in a lot of respects, but I don't think the Xbox/PS3 issues are necessarily their fault.