Originally posted by: Idontcare
Originally posted by: SlowSpyder
Originally posted by: BladeVenom
Charlie wasn't too far off. Just read what Anand said.
NVIDIA told me two things. One, that they have shared with some OEMs that they will no longer be making GT200b based products. That?s the GTX 260 all the way up to the GTX 285. The EOL (end of life) notices went out recently and they request that the OEMs submit their allocation requests asap otherwise they risk not getting any cards.
I wonder how this will affect their partners. Obviously there are still boards out there, and looks like their partners can get one last order of some of these EOL parts. But if Fermi is late, or Nvidia's partners run out of parts earlier than Fermi arrives in volume, I can't see those companies being too happy trying to live off of sales of GTX250's and other lower end parts while XFX, Asus, etc. are happily selling high end parts.
I imagine it can't be all that different from the ramifications in say the auto-industry when a large company like GM shutters a product lineup like Saturn.
The hurt is felt throughout the entire supplier eco-system for those who were overly reliant on that particular product lineup versus those competing products which stand to benefit from the reduction in competition. (suppliers to Asus, XFX, as you duly noted)
The thing is that with the semiconductor industry being so inherently volatile from a year-on-year revenue volume perspective for the past 30yrs I just can't imagine anyone actually having allowed themselves to be in a position where NV's decisions can cause significant material impact to their bottom line, including NV.
Everybody knows to count on nobody and nothing, you keep your fingers in as many pies at the same time as possible because one-trick ponies in this industry are pre-destined to fail within one four-year business cycle. Plenty of them do anyways (be one-trick ponies), to their own peril, but we are supposed to view that as capitalism at its finest.