Posted on Saturday, August 02 2008 @ 17:59 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bit Tech
had a casual chat with an AMD executive and heard NVIDIA key partner EVGA recently contacted them to start shipping Radeon graphics cards. However, instead of accepting the offer AMD gave EVGA a slap in the face and said ATI only needs eight partners because they don't want to saturate the market.
AMD's top brass casually told us yesterday that "[it] only needs eight partners" and that it doesn't want to damage the loyalty between them and itself after they've stuck by AMD through rough (HD 2900 XT) and the smooth (HD 4000-series).
Recently AMD has taken on Gainward Palit... no, wait, Gainward, as another partner but this was a strategic move for specific regions only.
AMD considers its world-wide coverage already sufficient and further saturating the market with yet another "sticker on generic product" doesn't do anyone any favours - with this sentiment we completely agree.
(Very) Unofficially, AMD said the only Nvidia partner it would want to work with was BFG in the States, but it couldn't see that happening either. Well, it all depends on how much profit margin Nvidia lets its board makers have in the future, otherwise they might see AMD or Intel's Larrabee become an attractive (or inevitable for survival) option.
