You may recall last week I reported on Linux founder Linus Torvalds and his battle with Nvidia (he called them the worst company to deal with), at the time he said Nvidia does not care about Linux and does a horrible job offering support for the platform. It appears the Chinese government took notice of that statement and it has cancelled an order for 10 million Nvidia based GPUs that would have been installed on Linux based government machines.
While Nvidia fully supports the Linux-based Android operating system its support has been called a “joke” and “pathetic” by many PC users.
The cut order is no small matter, Nvidia is expected to lose $200 million to $500 million because of its own support blunder.
Phoronix says the Chinese government was looking to complement their Longsoon processors and custom Linux OS with 10 million of NVIDIA’s GPU chips. Unfortunately for Nvidia the Longsoon processors are based on MIPS architecture which Nvidia’s Linux GPU drivers do not support.
The Chinese government offered to look at Nvidia’s source code on their own and develop custom drivers but Nvidia was unwilling to give up that intellectual property and the deal was cancelled in full.
Winning the contract was Nvidia competitor AMD, another company that has had Linux support issues but was more willing to work with the Chinese government to fix those issues and offer the 10 million needed GPUs.
Given the bad press surrounding Nvidia’s PC support for Linux drivers there’s a small chance they could soon offer better support for the ever-growing platform with its devoted followers.
