Partners mad over AMD, Nvidia's cavalier behaviour

As in years past, it's hard to get the mobo firms and others on the record, but when the chip designers make the people that have to use such things on their graphics cards and motherboards suffer, the bottom line starts to shrink faster than an, er, die shrink.

We talked to several AMD and Nvidia partners and asked them how they were feeling, since many of the cards on display are old news, with some even a whole year to year and a half old such as the X1900XT, 7600GT, 7300GS, X1300, X1600 and so on.

If we reported how they bluntly spoke their feelings, the channels' words would close this family magazine down overnight. Suffice it to say they feel bitterly disappointed at both AMD and Nvidia delaying their components and so the majority of companies cannot show any new and exciting tech and if they do, they are doing it either under wraps or out in the open.

Sales directors, product managers and two marketing and sales people from various Taiwanese companies lashed out at the chip firms. Their identities will remain unknown, and Satan Clara and Sunnyvale will have to play a guessing game. As nearly all of the partners are either disappointed or thoroughly cheesed off, good luck guys.

In the case of two particular partners, they were promised by Graphzilla that they would be among the first in the line for a G84/86 launch, but the companies decided to kill or totally tone down the production of 7600-based cards in order to be ready for a March 15th launch.

7300s were left in production, but those boards are unattractive to distributors over the 64-bit interface. Partners were delighted with the specs of G84 and G86 chips, so they decided not to buy more 7300 and 7600 chips and now their Q2 outlook is lying in the gutter.

Two manufacturers also told me they spent several hundred thousand dollars on developing their own products, and that's a very big hit, especially if you are manufacturing notebooks as well.

The dollar is fighting z losing battle with the Euro and Yen for several years now, and all of the components are priced in dollars. Secondly, for many products you have no choice to go with your own design, but you have to buy a complete product from a big company, and your margins are razor thin. Many of the companies are currently making less than 10 per cent profit margin, and this could end with next year's CeBIT and Computex having far fewer exibitors than this year.

If you are a reseller, you don't give a damn who manufactures your boards, Foxconn, Flextronics, Asus or whoever, but if you are a manufacturer, you have to keep your fabs up'n'running, otherwise you will end up like 3dfx.

One partner even said a one pretty heavy word in layman terms, and that was "cartel behaviour", since he believed that Nvidia decided to postpone the launch in conjuction with AMD. We have already said that Nvidia postponed the launch for a while since it was buying more time in order to have the drivers ready, and AMD was changing manufacturing process but this was not an arranged deal.

Did we already say the channel partners felt the chip firms were dangling them on a long and very expensive string? µ