Theres just too much talk here to go trough it all, but ill start five pages back and wind my way to the latest posts. Keep this in mind and try to read the whole thing before trying to debate or counter this post.
Dear Scali, let me try to explain the viewpoint of so many people, whom to you, come across as AMD fanboys or whatever you`d like to term them, as evidently seen in your "i have been attacked by people, not my arguments, but me".
This is ofcourse a debate technique, one which has its ups, but also its downsides. The downsides are proven well when your confronted by evidence of doing the same thing your accusing others off or just staving off and steering away from subjects which are relevant to the topic, but which you dont like yourself.
There are no upsides to resorting to ad strawminems and it is certainly not a technique that's accepted in meaningful debate practices.
People often seem to think that they can "win" an argument (which is especially foolish on the internet) when anyone reading their posts are perfectly capable of seeing whether their argument carry any merits beyond the futile attempt to prove their opponent wrong one way or another even if they have to take it into semantics territory.
This is especially true in the case where someone uses wikipedia factoids to keep up; everyone knows how painfully obvious it is to actual experts when someone with an indefensible stance is arguing for the sake of having the last word.
If your ultimate goal is to change someone's mind, which is commendable if you genuinely believe in your point being relevant and valid, then taking the adversarial approach does not help your stance at all but rather does it a disservice.
If, on the other hand, you are only in it to discredit someone because whatever point he brought forth puts a something you like in a bad light, then you aren't going to convince anyone who didn't agree with you for the wrong reasons to begin with and that would be catering to the wrong crowd.
As seen by the comments from alot of members, last of them being in this topic by Mem, there are opinions which differ from yours. As it should be. Noone needs to be forced into one or the other. If you like apples, fine. This doesnt look to be fine with you though.
I agree. However, I could bury you with quotes of unreasonable assertions made with no evidence and hasty conclusions based on shaky truthiness affirmed only when convenient for apparently the sole reason to "balance" out the amount of posts that make nvidia look normal. Were anyone to try and refute one of those, he/she would be sucked into a downward spiral where very soon, he'll be quoted into a technicality.
Everyone is entitled to his/her opinion but nobody is entitled to his/her own facts. I would only expect to have to defend an argument with evidence in the case of the latter, when someone is trying to assert something as fact and hopefully not defending himself by piledriving onto you.
There looks to be alot of posts where your only message, which you reiterate again and again, is that you would want AMD to act like Nvidia, do like Nvidia and be like Nvidia. A few examples to show my points:
Also, notice how i mostly quote your entire message, so as to not have any "your taking this out of context" whine.
Taking something out of context isn't just putting whatever came before and after those words along with it. To be able to quote someone, you have to understand what their point is; if you someone's quote to make them appear to mean something other than what they originally meant, then it is taking it out of context.
For instance, let me quote you: "There looks to be alot of posts where your only message, which you reiterate again and again, is that you would want AMD to act like Nvidia, do like Nvidia and be like Nvidia."
Okay. Unless I misunderstand you, you're saying that he's been repeating that he literally wants AMD to act like nvidia which means exactly what you meant to say in this context. Would you mind showing me where he did that without taking his words out of context?
Because it is a stretch from what he actually meant.
Look here, change of topic and the technique of making your debatent look like he is repeating himself. Reprimanding someone else for doing something you dont like, while doing the same yourself.
Why do you want to change the topic btw? The reason the member brought up that point, was because you compared it to something from AMD and said AMD did worse. Did he prove his point, that Nvidias doing was worse and thus you wanted to change the topic, since you couldnt make a winning argument?
Anyway, enough of that. We can conclude that you lost that argument. here is another.
The quote you linked doesn't match the post it links to so I'll only comment on what's in the actual posts.
The argument in question can be summed up with (and I'm paraphrasing so feel free to correct me) 'nvidia is evil because they wouldn't do anything to fix theirbumpgate cards unless sued and couldn't compensate everybody on their bad mobile chips' to which people replied 'being sued doesn't prove they were directly responsible for the occurrence and they did voluntarily shell out to compensate a lot of people in the case of the mobile chips'.
I don't want to be pointing fingers but if you erase all of the insinuations and condescending comments, this argument sounds pretty reasonable to me and naturally meandering from one case to another when the former has been discussed to death in this context is hardly changing the topic to dodge a question, in this case the question being "when does such an action ever REALLY cover the damage?" which is answered from applying to ALL cases of actions taken in response to hardware ending up below specs, not just nvidia's.
This is in reply to Janoo asking you to name subcontractor which was responsible for the Nvidia bumpgate scandal. Your in reality saying, Nvidia was not responsibly.
(emphasis mine)
No he isn't!
He's literally not saying that; he's saying that a fabless company doesn't have the technical experience of pcb process to be making decision on such a low level as deciding which solder to use. He's not even going the next step of saying 'therefore they most likely weren't directly responsible for it even if they did take responsibility when the proverbial excrement hit the cooling device', but only suggested we keep facts with facts and insinuations along with whatever those are worth to you because neither side has concrete and direct proof of what occured and if you take away all the unprovable, nvidia doesn't look any more evil than anyone else.
Ok, so now your saying Nvidia did have something to do with what materials were to be used on their cards. And lets assume for a second here that one business rule of thumb says that if you can "get away with something, still making a hefty amount of cash and while winning some marketshare, its ok to screw the customer" that Nvidia DID know what was going to happen. Certainly it would look naive in many peoples eyes if you dont think they should know.
That's a huge stretch here. He didn't say that nvidia had something to do with which solder was used, he said they could have had a say in it if they wanted to, being the client and all, but aren't likely to have exercised that right because that's not their area of expertise.
I tell my dentist (that's right, the heck with car analogies =P) to use a different type of anesthetic because I know I'm allergic but I certainly don't tell him to change his drill bit size even though I technically could if I had a good reason for that. If there's a screw up and I get an allergy the first time, I could elect to be responsible for omitting to check myself and telling him and he could elect to be responsible for having not checked my med history for common problems but neither of us are directly responsible, and certainly not in intent.
--- Your mentioning something about depreciation somewhere in this topic, ill just comment on that while im at the bumpgate discussion: This differs hugely, depending on big business og consumer parts. But it also differs in regions, as in the US versus the EU etc. And within each country there can be even heftier applications of this "depreciation" law.
In Norway almost all electronic equipment has a 5year warranty, if Nvidia doesnt cover it, the store you bought it from will. Everyone sees how these are interconnected.
So, NO Scali, i dont want hardware that lasts 2 years. I want hardware that lasts for as long as i need it to. If im someone who keeps my equipment clean, healthy etc and do everything i can to have Good, Working Hardware, i blood well EXPECT two products, each from different brands, to last just as long. Last i checked, it was not so with GPUs, as it is with Toyota versus Renault in the world of cars (yes i hate car analogies, but everyone is familiar with why Toyota has its reputation)
If in spite of taking well care of my hardware, one part, Nvidia GPU, burns out after 2 years, while one part, AMD GPU, lasts 5, then you better belive there IS a problem with Nvidia hardware and it should Not be occuring.
I wholeheartedly agree with you here that hardware shouldn't only last two years by design and nobody should expect it to be the rule but it's slightly missing the point.
The hardware defects mentioned are the exception to the rule. Their hardware usually have no longevity problems and it's not like they were trying to fool anyone that hardware should only last for the duration of the warranty. The point is stuff like this happens to everyone and will happen again and probably to everyone into the business of making silicon chips knows this; when it does, I agree that it sucks but it's kinda awkward to act all surprised as if that should never happen unless evil shenanigans took place.
So, whats it gonna be then? Are the makers of these products responsible or not? The question "who is resonsible, if Nvidia isnt?", was asked and you replied that its third parties.
But you named no third parties, instead you jumped 3 series of cards and ended up at Fermi to reiterated the old "TSMC brought bad process to both discreet GPU makers".
This can be argued to not hold true, since AMDs Evergreen series, although it was available in less quantity than it should have been, still suffered WAY less than Nvidias Fermi. Different architectures ofc and a whole new one for Nvidia, but we`ve been over this before. I think everyone considers AMDs 4770 on 40nm to be the right way to approach a new process node. And in this light people have argued that it IS Nvidias failing that led to Way lower than expected yields, not something entirely or even overly TSMCs failure of process technique.
Define responsible.
We could go to ridiculous lengths to argue that some process engineer in the fab was guilty of not foreseeing a problem based on information he might or might not have access to or that the dude in liaison with the fab didn't foresee the practices and correlated with the specs he gave them. You see how pointless the witch hunt is?
Furthermore, in the case of fermi/evergreen, it's pretty well known that evergreen suffered less from yield issues from being a smaller die and thus does nothing to refute "TSMC brought bad process to both discreet GPU makers". That's something people had no problem mentioning when it made amd look good but seem to forget when it also exonerates nvidia of such insinuations.
Read the part where I say that many people view this line of thinking as overly naive. Exactly what do you know about Nvidia not doing anything intentionally? Both AMD and Nvidia have intentionally done some shady stuff in the past. Lets be realistic, both companies are likely to act shady in the future aswell.
Hey we are getting somewhere. It seems we can agree on Nvidia making a mistake atleast. Thats a start.
So should we assume all bad things that happen to hardware makers are intentional until proven otherwise?
Because by that logic, the ati driver team must secretly be the league of super-villains against productivity.
Imho, there's a reason why most people who've worked in the field adhere to the rule of "never attributing something to malice that which can be attributed to common incompetence."
When I look at this situation giving both side the benefit of the doubt, this whole deal is a lot less dramatic.
It seems apparant (to me) that you`ve made a bad analogy with "the kids broke something and the parents are held responsible", I have to assume, since your being this vague, that you mean Nvidia is the parent. Who are the kids? Are you blaming EVGA, XFX etc or are you blaming THE kid: TSCM?
Bad analogy i guess. But your BP analogy is not so bad. Its just weird that you in one sentence call it "common sense and accepted practice" while in another you say its not right that BP should be held responsible since the fault lay with one of their subcontractors.
In business you investigate or make sure that your subcontractors are reliable and if nessesary you include clauses in the contracts that make the subcontractor liable if something goes wrong.
Atleast you do in private busineses. State or national stuff is often just given to the least expensive firm aslong as they meet the minimum requirements.
In other words, BP was held responsible and TOOK the blame. Much like Nvidia i guess, Im not intimately familiar with either case, other than having read it trough the press on both accounts.
His analogy could be called a poor one but it still works in the context that he brought it up as a counter-example of a statement that was way too general of "you broke it, you fix it and anything else is just excuses". That was nitpicky though.
I agree with the rest of what you said. However, it's sad that this level of scrutiny is never given to any company unless it's after-the-fact and only against companies we don't like. If a company simply happens to get lucky for a while, they seem to get a good reputation for the wrong reasons.
I would assume he IS focused on AMD vs Nvidia, guess what read the topic. This isnt about Intel. Intel has 0 discreet marketshare. Intel is not a competitor to AMD in what was ment as the discreet GPU segment. You know this was ment, yet you twisted his post to your liking so YOU could have a shot at him being anti Nvidia.
Intel can and should be Ignored in the discreet GPU market. When the Sandybridge/Lhano or whatever AMD calls their cpu/gpu battle is well started, THEN you can start talking about competition in the GPU segments. Intel basicly owning the integrated market is a topic entirely outside this one.
What exactly is so hard in understand why AMD Can not go with Nvidia? It has been explained to you several times in this topic Scali, that if AMD embraced Nvidias phyxs standard, they would help increase phyxs adoption to 100% in the discreet GPU segment while also locking themselves to their main competitors whims and tech. You just dont do that in business. AMD can run (and adapt) havok stuff on their own processors. Amd can run phyxs on their GPUs, BUT would be at the mercy of Nvidia if there came a time of change in software/code path change.
Another thing that should be taken into consideration is that Intel IS being watched by many eyes for anti competitive stuff. Using Intels stuff is MUCH safer for AMD than using Nvidias stuff. Much safer.
Ah where to begin?
Do you really mean to assert that intel shouldn't be brought up for the unrelated reason that they don't compete in the discrete market? Especially since their integrated solutions do compete with low-end discrete offerings which are directly driven by high end technology race, but just on the value front?
Even if it weren't so, his point is perfectly valid that there's no rule saying that in the dynamics of 2 competitors, whether one adopts the other's standards is strictly along party lines. It's not, it's much more complicated.
I'm not going to go into the whole physx issue again because as you said, it's been discussed to death and neither side seems willing to accost the other's arguments candidly. And by that I mean that you know it's obvious why amd can't go with nvidia's standards but don't mention it's obvious why nvidia can't bend over to amd's side; so n the end it shouldn't be hard to meet one another in the middle where nvidia doesn't make physx ati-compliant for the same reason ati doesn't make their cards physx compliant, because it's a textbook case of a mexican standoff both financially and in terms of losing face. That's something where neither camp can be justified with a precedent from another case.
Anyway, the list could go on forever quoting you.
In closing:
There is no need to attack you. Your arguments however and your discussion technique leave you open to harsher than needed replies.
You change subjects when you dont have any winning arguments or when you are proven to have spread misinformation or when you have contradicted yourself or amended your viewpoints to take into regard a confrontative argument from another member.
In one way, we really should get over this. But with the short intervals these questions pop up again, i doubt we will ever stop talking about these companies with our arguments of one being better than the other etc.
Its only natural.
I'm happy to hear more people willing to argue without resorting to personal attacks. Although the paragraph after you said that was kind of an attack.
And while a passionate discussion is only a sign of a healthy forum, it doesn't have to be a contest to win. Suggesting otherwise is really not giving your readers any credit.
You've made some points but still there's a tendency of either portraying someone as being wrong on all counts or nothing and often having to make outlandish claims along with valid points to do so; if anything you'll be far more convincing if you were willing to at least give some credit because while scali might not exactly be on the popular side, he has made far more contributions based on his technical insights and disproved far more misinformation than anyone else I've read from.
ps: This thread is now one reply away from being home to the great tree of text.
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