Stop selling AMD's stuff at all != sell AMD's stuff under different naming.
While technically true, that is a very nice way of saying "make your established, well known and respected gaming brands (with a lot of brand appeal) Nvidia exclusive, and make up something new for AMD." The first sounds acceptable, but that's only due to leaving out the details in the second.
Nvidia is totally right about fake rumors, conjecture and mistrusts about GPP. Because you know who you are said that GPP forces AIBs to stop selling AMD cards at all, they must stop making AMD motherboards.
If people said that, that is indeed too wide an interpretation of what has been reported. What seems entirely accurate, though, is that the GPP forces AIBs to stop selling AMD cards under their established premium gaming brands.
Thought experiment: if Qualcomm pressured Samsung into selling its Exynos-powered variants of the S8/S9 under a different brand than Galaxy, would you deem that as anticompetitive?
sith'ari: I'll have to do this point by point, so bear with me please.
1) If you have a problem with that, such as myself, then in my opinion, you should state what other companies are doing as well, just as i have during my posts at [H] and here as well.
No. That is a distraction, and nothing else. This is a discussion based on revelations that Nvidia has been engaged in potentially serious anti-competitive practices. As such, it is a discussion of one specific example. I'll gladly take part in a second discussion that takes on the subject more in general, but that does in no way belong here. The
only result of bringing this up here is either to say "all major corporations are corrupt" (which I believe is largely true, and thus not really worth discussing over this one specific example), to distract people from discussing Nvidia's specific ("alleged", though at this point largely proven) wrongdoing, or to make it seem like less of a big deal due to how common it is.
If you paid any attention at my comments, you would have seen that all this time i've been asking why noone protected my "consumer choices" back when nForce chipsets were completely cut-off from the market, when the mining-inflasion prevented me for months to buy a GPU without paying a fortune, when Microsoft have already been dominating for decades gaming market at the OS sector but in this case noone seems to care, when Intel used illegal practices during the past (*i posted video from AdoredTV about that), etc etc.
I know how corporations work (*i've already said it many times) and i know that if they have a leverage to maximize their profits, they will exploit it, regardless if this company is Intel, nVidia, AMD, Microsoft, ASUS, MSI, ...whatever!!
I completely agree here. The PC tech industry has had, and still has, some major problems with regard to corruption, price fixing, anti-competitive practices, and general corruption. Some of it has been tackled in court (Intel is the most major case, but Qualcomm has also seen some hefty fines, among others), but far too little. Most of this is due to the agencies supposed to be controlling this being grossly underfunded and not given enough resources both in terms of manpower and money. This is a public policy issue both in the EU and US, and can only be solved politically. Making noise about specific, large-scale cases of corruption is one possible way of making the problems known, and pushing for improvements. Sadly, with the right-wing wave of the last decade and the sweeping deregulation and cuts in public spending over the same period, this problem has only gotten worse.
So i can't stand the logic when someone says that he wants to "protect my consumer choices" starting a campaign only against nVidia !!
Excuse me but i'll never believe that !!
No, my consumer choices are being impacted all the time, as i explained, so i won't let anyone to implicate me -as a consumer- into legal matters that involve companies .
If they feel threatened, then let them sue each other and go to courts like they have done in the past!! Don't try to manipulate me (*not you, general comment
) to believe that some multinational companies care for me and others not., because my next thought will be that you have an interest for doing this. Period !!!
That's a rather fatalist view. I entirely agree that believing that major corporations care about any of us beyond our money is naive, but that's not the same as saying "they're all equally bad." There's plenty of nuance left still, and calling out specific cases of corruption is a worthwhile activity, as
not doing so is effectively saying "I don't care, do what you want."
2) Also , i'll never understand the argument that all these AIBs aren't doing anything because they are afraid of the consequences !!
Dell said NO, HP said NO, so i'm pretty sure that ASUS, MSI, GIGABYTE and i don't know who else... , could also have said NO and combined ,altogether, they could go nVidia to courts if they feel that nVidia threatens them with illegal practices !!!
So, just Dell & HP refused, they could also refuse because, guess what... the program is voluntary (just like nVidia was saying at their announcement) and their refusal have proven that they DO have a choice!!
P.S. With this kind of "being afraid logic" AMD should have never gone to courts in the past against a giant like Intel, but guess what : they did go, and they won as well !! And also guess what: Intel is much stronger company than nVidia, so forgive me if i don't believe this all "fear" argument.
This'll likely be a minor wall of text, but it has to be done in one go:
Firstly: sure, AIB partners
could have banded together and sued Nvidia. This is problematic in quite a few ways, though. Firstly, if Nvidia got word that, say, Gigabyte was approaching other AIBs with this goal, Nvidia would cut off Gigabyte's GPU supply
immediately. Gigabyte would be bankrupt within months, as they're entirely reliant upon Nvidia's parts to stay in business - long before any lawsuit or criminal case could bring back supply. Nvidia wouldn't really care, as their sales would be affected minimally, shifted to other AIB partners. The same goes for pretty much every AIB partner - even Asus, though they're the most diversified into other large-scale markets like laptops of all Nvidia AIB partners, they're still massively vulnerable due to the major part of their business they do selling AIB GPUs and laptops with dGPUs. This would have to be
big for it to actually affect Nvidia's sales noticeably. And Nvidia-only partners like Zotac would never join, as they don't have any other significant business.
Even if they got a plan in place and collectively filed suit - and that would require more or less every AIB partner to join in to be effective, regardless of their size and financial situation - Nvidia could
still bankrupt most of them by cutting off GPU supply. Why should Nvidia continue to supply parts to someone who has taken legal action against them? Sure, this might also be of questionable legality, but any criminal investigation and litigation would take years if not decades, leaving AIB partners without components in the meantime. In short: They'd all either go bankrupt or have to face
major restructuring. Nvidia would strike manufacturing deals with other companies and get back in their stride within months.
This alone is problematic for publicly traded companies. Why? Because they have a fiscal responsibility to their shareholders. In other words: if they act in a way that they know will damage business, shareholders can, and will, sue - and they would win. Which would further harm the companies, of course. But shareholders care about profits, not about Asus' or Gigabyte's survival. In other words: the boards of any publicly traded companies would
immediately be fired if they agreed to sue Nvidia, and the companies would subsequently pull out of the suit, all while seeing massive stock price drops and heaps of shareholder suits. Nobody wants that.
Dell and HP are different, though. Why? Well, firstly, they're not AIB partners, and thus don't rely exclusively on GPU deliveries from Nvidia to ensure a large portion of sales. The might still lose sales, but nowhere near to the same effect as, say Asus. A major portion of the people buying dGPU-equipped PCs from HP or Dell want a "gaming PC", and don't know/care enough to care what GPU is in it. Secondly, and most importantly: they don't make most their money from their consumer business. HP has a
massive enterprise arm that would largely be unaffected by this, and which could easily keep the company afloat alone. Dell's enterprise arm really isn't much smaller. For comparison, Asus has near zero presence in the enterprise market. In other words: HP and Dell would both probably be fine with a period of component cut-off from Nvidia. They'd have AMD parts for their gaming PCs (which AMD would gladly sell them, as it'd increase their total sales), and they'd have Intel iGPUs for the remaining 80%+ of their PC revenue.
In other words: Dell and HP were in a drastically different position in "negotiating" (as if this was a negotiation - accepting or declining a contract is not a negotiation) this with Nvidia. AIB partners are pretty much entirely dependent on their parts suppliers, especially in a two-supplier market like GPUs. They could always shop around for DRAM or VRM components, but you're not getting a GPU to sell without working with either Nvidia or AMD - and Nvidia has ~80% of the market, and thus
a lot of power. AIB partners are the PC industry's version of tenant farmers, left entirely to the whims of their "landlords". The relation of power here is
massively skewed towards the supplier side, and pretending it isn't doesn't help anyone.
, based on what Kyle has claimed at his article) . They had to sacrifice something in order to get something else, pure definition of "opportunity cost".
) it was implied that one of the reasons that some of the big-laptop "industry-gamers" have denied GPP, was that they might already had similar deals with other ones (Intel), and this was causing a conflict of interest. ( give a look at16:00m of that video)
.
