Shows how less you know about commerce.
If 9 out of 10 companies buy a product at price and get a discount of 20% for not acquiring the competitor's product as well, and that remaining company gets 0% discount, just the batch price because it wants to serve its clients every option that there is... how do you think it would be able survive? The other 9 co. can just add a 19% profit and that would mean a clear loss for that single one company.
In this situation, and in my view... that's far from fair business!
It is perfectly fair because if Company A is offering a discount, then there is nothing stopping Company B from offering a discount either. Again, I see this in my families business all the time, our suppliers constnatly offer us discounts as long as we buy from them only, we don't so we don't get the discounts, but that doesn't mean the offers disappear.
Your ideas are flawed in that you don't take into account the fact that Intel had competition. It isn't an issue of if they didn't take the discount, then they would have to sell Intel products with lower profits. They just better be buying AMD products at competitive prices to what Intel's products with the discount. It is competition, if AMD wants to compete, they need to offer their products to the companies at competitive prices.
No, you're misinformed! AFAIK it was QPI for NF200less-SLI-enabled Intel boards! This way, the mobo manufacturers could choose if they want SLI for 5$ through a soft mod, no SLI at all or the alternative, a 50$ to 100$ NF200 version (price depending on manufacturer) that would enable SLI. That was the deal... but once Intel got their 5$ mod, NV got nothing!
Actually, you are misinformed. The NF200 thing didn't come up till about half way through the ordeal.
At first, nVidia wanted to make true chipsets for the i7. However, to do that they need to use QPI, which they need to license from Intel. NVidia wanted Intel to allow them to use QPI for free, Intel would have no part of that. And Intel is in the right here, they spent a huge amount to develope it, they aren't going to give it away for use for free, especially not to a company just so they can develope a competing product. By the time nVidia finally caved and agreed to pay licensing fees for QPI it was too late for them to get a chipset out before launch, in fact we still haven't seen a chipset from them.
Of course this would have screwed nVidia, because it would mean that they would not have an SLi solution out for the i7 for a large amount of time, and poeple would be using Crossfire exclusively. So nVidia's next big idea was to simply have motherboard manufacturers put NF200 chips on any i7 motherboard that they wanted to support SLi. The backfired because the manufacturers told nVidia they wouldn't have enough time to develope boards like this in time for the i7 launch, and they also told nVidia they would likely not produce many boards with the NF200 chip due to the extra cost.
This is finally when nVidia gave up on having one of their chips on every SLi board, and finally just allowed manufacturers to qualify the board for SLi by simply paying a small licensing fee and sending nVidia samples for SLi qualification.
I hope you mean that.
