The NSA’s shitty monitoring practices are well known. That didn’t stop them from continuing to monitor.
When you’re the biggest game in town, smaller fish (AIB partners) have no choice but to play ball.
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Not at all, beyond the obvious poor optics there are legal issues at play here, and the FTC could step in also.
I don’t see it hurting their bottom line at all, unless FTC steps in.
I’m very eager to see them not do this, but I just don’t see anything other than government intervention stopping them. They’ve done shitty things like this in the past and it’s only helped their bottom line.
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I kinda want them to go full steam with this so AMD can slap them over the head with it in the EU courts
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Corporations like Intel and Nvidia calculate the costs of such things, including the costs of being found guilty in court and fined. Once in a while they do get fined big time, but that’s just part of their routine operating costs and they will even commit illegal practices knowing they will pay a huge fine, but the opportunity to stomp their competition into the dirt is something even more valuable to them. The question is not whether Nvidia will get away with this, but how much more crap like this can you expect them to keep pushing.
They have already declined to release their new Tesla architecture on the market because they have no real competition from either Intel or AMD. Rather than releasing a new gaming video card, they are releasing a new mining card to compete against AMD’s, which making record profits at this time. For these companies, such things are actually a small part of their business, with Nvidia being much more heavily invested in AI research and Intel rushing to catch up. Their situation is no different from governments developing weapons and all the usual spy-vs-spy crap because, surprise, its the same people.
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I still think they’ll claim the entire thing is a big misunderstanding and pull back from everything Kyle said. We’ll see.
LOL, Nvidia is a money making machine that makes banks look tame. EA games was voted the worst company of year and shrugged it off as so much chatter from the peasants. Their entire board of directors are ruthless business people who often know absolutely nothing about technology. Unfortunately, neither do their customers. Oooooh, Shinny!
Sometimes I think all Americans should be compelled to take a tour of Crystal City. Its an entire city of skyscrapers build next door to the pentagon, with its own subway between the two and extensive underground tunnels under all the buildings, so satellites cannot spy on them. The uniforms only sometimes allow you to distinguish government personnel from private sector. The same people who charge the government $400.oo for a hammer, often work for the government and are merely the front men who take the fall and launder the money, one foot in the Pentagon and the other on Wall Street.
That’s why these days, Washington D.C. has more marble than ancient Rome.
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They could be even bigger dicks to their partners and change the name or the program and the file injunctions against anyone that signs up so they cannot talk about it. That would be mega messed up and totally something I can see them doing.
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I’m sure anyone who’s signed up is NDA’d.
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Its a question of how much the courts want to charge them for the privilege, but they can’t find out unless they try. Free market economics have always been a great sales pitch.
Of course, Kyle’s entire article was sourced from anonymous leaks. NDAs don’t matter, stuff like this will be leaked because it isn’t in the OEMs’ best interests.
This too but it has not stopped them talking. In the end I can see it as nVidia threatening its partners with crippling legal action, which I know NDAs should cover but they just don’t, so stepping it up would not be surprising.
The thing is they have been setting them selves up to do away with Partners. Their founders cards that are in house and early release are full finished cards now. If partners don’t play ball or go against them then nVidia might just end up going it solo in time. They have the user base, they have the tech, so they could just decide to not bother tempting partners as they get more and more able to just side step them.
3dfx had the same bright idea when they bought S3. Didn’t work out well for them. The ecosystem of OEMs releasing cards based on their technology has worked out rather well for Nvidia, and they would be foolish to toss them under the bus.
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They don’t need to do that, the ability to punish the ones not getting in line might be enough.
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That would be an interesting turn of events. Now you’ve got me interested.
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This has had me thinking. What other technologies does nvidia have beyond GPUs? Maybe nvidia has something in the pipeline we dont know about yet. Cant really think of anything that would benefit OEMs and AIBs enough to sign a exclusivity deal.
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Maybe, but times and ideas are changing. All ready most of the review sites, videos and continuing new builds still use the “Founders Edition” over AIB partner cards because they work, they are available, they look good and were available before anybody else could get their designs out. They were not short lived initial release cards like most other Reference Coolers, they continue to be popular and effective cards.
Those ahead of general release FE cards I see as a test for this situation, a test that clearly worked.
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Yup, that will be nvidia’s play.
“Look what happened. You AIB partners need us more than we need you.”
And since AMD doesn’t have a competitive product…
Hmmm, good catch.
It could just be marketing BS, but the first tech area that comes to mind is VR.
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