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NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau

NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau

Posted Sep 24, 2013 12:45 UTC (Tue) by lsl (subscriber, #86508)
In reply to: NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau by khim
Parent article: NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau

> And apparently nVidia is in deep trouble.

You quote Charlie Demerjian on matters regarding Nvidia? On LWN? Seriously?


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NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau

Posted Sep 24, 2013 13:16 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Why not? He knows a lot about nVidia troubles and even if he exaggerates a bit his information about them is usually accurate. Now AMD is another matter—there he tends to ignore some dangerous trends and it's where he can not be trusted.

The same approach can be used with Dan Dilger or any other fanboi: as long as you don't use him as source of information about Apple (where he tends to ignore all the potential problems) you can find many interesting things there.

NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau

Posted Sep 24, 2013 16:43 UTC (Tue) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]

I like Charlie and followed the website before he took it subscription. But he's rarely even 50% accurate. The vast majority of his predictions end up wrong.

Don't get me wrong, I think nVidia is in trouble, but it's a long term trouble not a trouble that's going to happen in a year or even three. This trouble is Intel eating away at the bottom of the market. It's hard to make money and be successful when the guy selling the CPU's begins integrating your product. Their other ventures (HPC and Tegra) have been the less than stellar successes predicted.

Those are the reasons nVidia is in trouble, not the weekly "I hate nvidia" rant by Charlie.

NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau

Posted Sep 25, 2013 3:58 UTC (Wed) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]

Demerjian's fun to read, but every single time, every single one, he's there predicting disaster for NVidia, and with one notable exception, they've shipped perfectly acceptable products every time. I think it was the 280 that actually was rather a disaster, but everything since has been anywhere from good to great.

I don't know why he has such a bee in his bonnet about that company, but the man does not seem to be in the same reality the rest of us are, where NVidia is generally shipping cards that outperform its rival, while costing a fair bit less to make.

AMD's much stronger in compute in this generation, but from a gaming perspective, which is the largest market for these cards, meh, big deal. Meanwhile, NVidia provides actual gaming performance that's as good or better on a much smaller -- and therefore cheaper, and more profitable -- chip.

Yet, Demerjian was frothing about terrible the 6XX series was going to be, and then how awful the 7XX series was going to be.

The man is not credible. You shouldn't link him.

NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau

Posted Sep 25, 2013 10:21 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Demerjian's fun to read, but every single time, every single one, he's there predicting disaster for NVidia, and with one notable exception, they've shipped perfectly acceptable products every time.

Really? What kind of “disaster” he predicted that failed to materialize? Bumpgate? GT300 woes? Tegra 1/2 woes? GF100 woes? Or Tegra3 non-woes? Or maybe GK104 blameshifting? Or, I don't know, Tegra 4 problems?

If you'll read his articles and compare them with what actually happened you'll see that he's usually pretty accurate, but that sometimes people expand the troubles he describes to unrealistic proportions. When Demerjian's talks about “nVidia's Tegra 1 & Tegra 2” problems they expand it to “nVidia's Tegra problem” and counter with Tegra 3, when he talks about “nVidia's trouble with mobile Tegra 4 line” they counter with bunch of tablet announces (not even releases so far—only couple of tablets and nVidia Shield were actually released) and when problems with GF100 are announced they counter with GTX 480 which does not use all 16 SMs!

Demerjian may underestimate the power of nVidia's PR but his description of nVidia's technical problems are usually quite accurate. Too bad he does not do the same service for AMD.

I don't know why he has such a bee in his bonnet about that company, but the man does not seem to be in the same reality the rest of us are, where NVidia is generally shipping cards that outperform its rival, while costing a fair bit less to make.

And that is the power of PR I'm talking about.

Meanwhile, NVidia provides actual gaming performance that's as good or better on a much smaller -- and therefore cheaper, and more profitable -- chip.

Really? In which world 360mm² of GTX 560 are smaller then 255mm² of HD 6870? Or 221/294mm² of GTX 680 is smaller then 212mm² of HD 7870? Only in latest generation nVidia achieved smaller via bifurcation of their chips—which has it's own problems.

The man is not credible.

Well, yeah. If you'll carefully scan everything he write about nVidia, ignore pieces where he correctly wrote about nVidia woes and also pieces where he plain out says the short story is that Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) will win this round on just about every metric, some more than others then yes, you can piece together story of his unworthiness. But you can do such spin with more-or-less any author out there.

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