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ABIs will have already made tons of cards, boxed up and ready to ship out, just contractually unable to sell them on-masse quite yet. And now they really can't
by TheRealPomax 4y ago
ABIs will have already made tons of cards, boxed up and ready to ship out, just contractually unable to sell them on-masse quite yet. And now they really can't sell them until they've reprogrammed and reboxed them to show up as (almost certainly) 4070 instead of 4080 because that's essentially what they are. The 4070 wasn't missing from the lineup: the GPU chip on the 4080 12gb model is literally a completely different chip from the one on the 4080 16gb.
(Think of it like Intel calling the 14th gen i5 "an i9". Or heck, Exor deciding to label a Fiat sports car "a Ferrari 812 V4" while keeping the real thing "a Ferrari 812 GTS").
And of course, that's an gigantic dick move because it costs NVidia nothing to announce this, but probably means no one will even be able to make a profit on the 4080 12GB cards they already made (which a cynic might say was precisely NVIDIA's goal here, as plausibly deniable punishment dished out to the remaining ABIs for daring to let one of their own disobey the corporate overlord).
If EVGA hadn't already broken their partnership, this definitely would have make them do so. "Thank you for jumping through our hoops, after paying for the entire course yourself, now make a new course because you displeased your master" is not a great way to treat your partners.
- Workaccount2 4y agoNvidias arrogance is going to do them in.
- TheRealPomax 4y agoThat's pretty unlikely, given their thirty year history of "this kind of thing".
- happycube 4y agoIntel all but rebadged dual-core i3's as i5's and i7's in mobile for years.
- TheRealPomax 4y agoBut crucially, mobile is an OEM market, not a consumer market.
- TheRealPomax 4y agoCurious about the downvote. The EOM market is a very different beast, in that OEM market doesn't suffer from the "reviewer peer pressure". If a million youtube reviewers go "this 4080 is a 4070, wtf??" including people like "Steve from Gamer's Nexus", Jason Langevin, and Linus Sebastian, you change your tune (even if you don't admit that's why) because consumers pay attention to this people. But in the OEM market, that pressure literally doesn't exist. Intel can call things whatever they like on the OEM side, but unless that affects the enthusiast OEM market (which is, let's be real: extremely small) no one is ever going to call it out, let alone care.
- vhold 4y agoIf true, it reminds me of the reputation that Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore computers, had in the 80s of screwing over his suppliers to the point they would no longer do business with him.