Quote:
Originally Posted by Vulpesveritas
See I've been reading the situation a different way. The quarter ends the 31st of this month, and Nvidia has the NDA not end until about a week before the quarter.
While I can see it your way, I see it more plausible that Nvidia is trying to hold back AMD's first quarter profits back as much as they can, saying "kepler is unbeatable" and the like. If it were truly unbeatable, why doesn't Nvidia just show us the part and benchmarks and show that it is, getting people whom right now are being told to wait instead told to go get a kepler GPU. Surely they have working silicon.
Look at AMD for example with their APUs, they've proven to be effective to SB/IB in laptops, and are marketing them by their benchmark scores, despite not being released. Intel has released benchmarks of Ivy bridge despite only 10-20% increase over SB.
Yet Nvidia, while touting that they're unbeatable with kepler, have it under lock and key until the end of the quarter.
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My take on that is that Nvidia is not worried about how much AMD profits this quarter. Set aside the fact that volume is so low that it's not going to be much anyway, lower AMD sales on that segment are not going to make them, Nvidia, sell more Kepler cards. It won't make them sell more GTX500 cards either, wuite the opposite. If GTX680 is better it will sell as many cards as they can make. AMD can sell all the cards in the world for all they care, they're just as supply constrained as they are, more probably because practically the only thing Nvidia has said about Kepler is that they have been stockpiling for a hard launch. Whether it's completely true or not remains to be seen, it's the ony official claim either way.
The thing is that for some reason a lot of people think this is an AMD vs Nvidia thing, and that that is the case for them. It's not. Nvidia cares about their sales and profits and nothing more and will do what is better for their profits. Releasing info about Kepler before launch is not going to make them sell more cards, never really did, never will. People buying this kind of hardware waits for reviews. And on the downside, it can tell AMD what to do next. So why do they need to release anything, when silence is just as good or better marketing campaign? So they remain tight lipped and AMD is in the dark.