WMGroomAK

Just going to toss this out there that maybe AMD is less interested in working on DirectX, which they know has a performance impact on their hardware, than trying to push more adoption of Vulkan API...

Just wanted to post that Ian Cutress with Anandtech published the transcript and interpretations of their call with CTS and it makes for an interesting read... https://www.anandtech.com/show/12536/our-interesting-call-with-cts-labs

I'm just going to toss this out here as some of my thoughts but I see impacts to OEMs as just as big, if not potentially bigger than AIB impacts... If an OEM needs to have the gaming brand aligned with nVidia, this would be a fairly significant impact as most OEMs maintain only a single established gaming brand. In addition, if we assume or it is proven that these kind of partnership agreements are legal for dGPUs, then it may not take much more for Intel to pursue a similar path for CPUs. I could see Intel wanting to form 'partnership' agreements with OEMs that basically say that they must align their Gaming brands with Core i Series processors and workstations with Xeon processors.

Reading the FTC site and the US Codes that they enact, I'm thinking if the effects of the contracts/partnerships occur as the original article describes, even if the contracts are not technically illegal, they will probably be viewed as anti-competitive by the FTC. The complication comes up on if the contract as it's enacted creates a situation that is detrimental to nVidia's competition. I think that in this case it would be viewed under Single Firm conduct given how much of the gaming GPU market that nVidia enjoys... Of course, maybe nVidia ran their proposed language by the FTC and other major regulatory bodies first in order to obtain an opinion (good legal CYA), however, the longer that they and their partner OEMs and AIBs postpone in officially and on the record addressing Kyle's article, the worse it actually looks for them. 15 USC 2 Monopolizing Trade a felony: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/2 15 USC 45 Unfair methods of competition unlawful: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/45 FTC Anticompetitive Practices: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices

As you brought up your own posts on HardOCP, you may want to clarify the pretty heated thread discussion that you had over there and how they locked it... I would post a link to it, but that might be against the community rules of this forum. Not defending Kyle on this, however, it may seem like you have an axe to grind with him right about now.

The problem that you begin to run into with this is that it begins to skate really close to the whole Intel v AMD case from about a decade ago... What's to stop Intel from telling Dell that they can only advertise their processors under a certain computer name like Alienware?

The added problem if you're Asus, MSI, Gigabytes, etc on this approach is that you already have brand name establishment with RoG, Aorus, Gaming X, and so on, so if you are splitting it up into different names then you have to re-establish brands on those new card series, which increases your costs. Plus, I'm fairly sure that nVidia would not look kindly on a company for being relegated to a new naming tier over a well established one...

And Flippy is now on break? Sounds like they got too much attention and interest requiring additional staff training and increasing Flippy's speed... http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43343956

I would think it's a problem for both... It would mean that Dell and/or other OEMs may not purchase as many Hades Canyon from Intel as they otherwise might have.

Might fall into one of those unintended consequences of OEMs being a part of the program... Depending on how things are worded, it could easily turn into a situation where a company like Dell could not market a low-end laptop with a Hades Canyon chipset as an Alienware laptop due to the agreement.

It's not like Intel is completely out of the GPU market... They still have their iGPUs and they have a partnership with AMD for the Hades Canyon chips. My opinion is that those were probably what the author was referring to when referring to Intel.

I'm sure AMD has some kind of program. I think one of the questions is whether their partner program (or any partner program) limits what can and cannot be marketed or sold by a company.

I would love to have more sources to report from, but hopefully with at least Kyle's report out there and more tech sites picking up his report nVidia will at least clear some of this up...

So I read this article by Kyle over on HardOCP and found it interesting if all of his reporting checks out... Essentially, AMD brought some of the details of nVidia's GeForce Partners Program (GPP) to his attention as well as other tech journalists concerning the potential anti-competitiveness of the program. As the article is written, it would appear that AIB and OEMs that participate in the program receive support from nVidia on a variety of fronts however, they can only market nVidia products under their gaming lines... https://www.hardocp.com/article/2018/03/08/geforce_partner_program_impacts_consumer_choice Before we go any further, in the effort to be as transparent as possible, we need to let you know that AMD came to us and presented us with "this story." AMD shopped this story with other websites as well. However, with the information that was presented to us by AMD, there was no story to be told, but it surely pointed to one that was worth looking into. There needed to be some legwork done in collecting facts and interviews. At this point you're probably wondering, "What is NVIDIA GPP?" A couple of weeks after we began questioning NVIDIA on GPP, it put up an article on its blog.nvidia.com domain entitled, "GeForce Partner Program Helps Gamers Know What They're Buying." Here what John Teeple, Director - Partner Marketing at NVIDIA, has to say about GPP. ... We have contacted seven companies about their part in NVIDIA GPP and not one of the seven would talk to us on the record if they spoke to us about it at all. The ones that did speak to us have done so anonymously, in fear of losing their jobs, or having retribution placed upon them or their companies by NVIDIA. All of the people that I did interview at AIBs and at OEMs did however have the same thoughts on GPP. 1.) They think that it has terms that are likely illegal. 2.) GPP is likely going to tremendously hurt consumers' choices. 3.) It will disrupt business with the companies that they are currently doing business with, namely AMD and Intel. The crux of the issue with NVIDIA GPP comes down to a single requirement in order to be part of GPP. In order to have access to the GPP program, its partners must have its "Gaming Brand Aligned Exclusively With GeForce." I have read documents with this requirement spelled out on it. I definitely encourage going over and reading the whole article. It brings into question though as to whether this is marketing gone bad on nVidia's part? Is this anti-competitive? Does it open nVidia up for potential lawsuits? Or is it all sour grapes from AMD? I'm personally thinking that it might be a little bit of nVidia trying to further strengthen their market position while AMD also trying to play whistleblower... Again, so far all of this is based off of Kyle's article, however, it could prove to be an interesting discussion (as long as we don't go down the fanboy/flame war path). Forbes Article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/03/08/report-alleges-new-nvidia-program-engages-in-monopolistic-anti-consumer-practices/#8cb925922419 PCPer Link: https://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/GeForce-Partner-Program-has-some-Kool-Aid-it-would-you-try

Sad when you now have to make a decision on risking a firmware patch over a potential hardware exploit... I might give this firmware patch some time before installing just to be extra sure there are no little bugs that will pop up unexpectedly.

If the slides from PC Per are correct, then they are looking at a fairly diverse selection of devices for the embedded processors. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing some thin and light laptops with a V1807B as there don't appear to be many of the Ryzen mobile systems on the market... Or there could be some stuff similar to Intel's NUCs for streaming and gaming in the living room. https://www.pcper.com/news/Processors/AMD-goes-after-15B-embedded-space-two-new-embedded-processors

Well, you can try telling the birds to "git gud", it's just not going to do anything... Hopefully less birds run into their windows than employees. I think a more interesting side point on this is that reading a MarketWatch article on this, they point out that Apple could be in violation of California workplace safety laws if they removed safety markings from their windows for 'aesthetic' reasons... https://www.marketwatch.com/story/people-are-walking-into-glass-at-the-new-apple-headquarters-2018-02-15

Do people on smartphones now equal birds flying into windows??? Just couldn't help modifying a part of the Humane Societies bird tips for this... http://m.humanesociety.org/animals/resources/tips/bird_safe_windows.html

My suggestion for a collaboration video would be building a high power Mineral Oil PC with some kind of dye in it and using the high speed cameras to capture the thermal transference from the parts. Or basically make a lava lamp PC for the swirly colors in Slow-Mo...

Now here is the question... By including the offending character in this post, will that cause people trying to view this on iOS to crash? Also, other sources are reporting as of 4:30 PM US Eastern Time that they will be rolling out a fix for iOS, MacOS and WatchOS in the near future (probably before 11.3 is formally released). https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/15/apple-ios-iphone-messages-crash-bug-fix/

Just saw this on Engadget and thought it would be a neat update to the DIY speakers from a year ago... Would be neat to see if a $190.00 development board and a Raspberry Pi makes for as good of an experience as a pre-built speaker system. Make your own WiFi/Bluetooth speakers from a set of non-connected speakers: https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/15/bang-and-olufsen-beocreate-amp/ Original DIY Speaker Video:

Might be a unicode text issue within the app as that is currently being reported on as a serious bug causing crashes in 11.2.5... Or it could be that 11.2.5 is buggy as hell and should never have been pushed out as an update. https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/iphone-text-bomb-ios-mac-crash-apple/

Actually find this to be a bit interesting... Besides the wonderful naming scheme of Ultimate Performance, it should be interesting to see how much more Ultimate any performance truly is and what is the energy/thermal expense that you are getting that at. Next question is since they will have an Ultimate Performance, how do they one up it? Can we get a Supreme Ultimate Performance?

My thinking is that it would have been best in this instance instead of ruling out the various processors that are listed as to why not to get those, just go forward with the fact that a good processor for a CAD workstation should be a good balance of high single threaded performance and multi-threaded workload and then just say that their testing finds the 8700 or 8700k to strike that balance. Bringing up the lack of ECC support in the Intel HEDT product stack really seemed to lack much purpose in the aspect of the whole video.

Except that the only Intel processors that support ECC are Xeons and not i9 and that appeared to me to be the toss away remark that was made as to why you should not go with an i9 for this build... The remark that is made is that a "Core i9 is out of the question because Intels HEDT lineup lacks support for ECC memory..." Not arguing the single threaded performance, just found the comment about ruling out an i9 due to ECC memory support and then recommending a processor without ECC memory support to be a little weird.