Okay.
It's when show time again,
or that is to say it was when show time.
About 20 minutes ago.
About 20 minutes ago.
Thank you for your patience.
Those of you who are watching on YouTube.
In a certain dimension.
This is not very meaningful to you.
We were on time today.
In some time zone, we were on time.
It's five o'clock somewhere,
which is irrelevant because we don't start at five.
Wait, yes we do.
Oh crap.
But not in that time zone.
Not in that, well, uh.
Ha ha ha.
Um.
Can we blame daylight saving time?
Oh, yeah.
There we go.
That was last weekend.
That was it, yup.
So actually, no one's gonna be watching this week anyway.
Like go look at the viewership statistics.
Probably everyone was like,
everyone everywhere else in the world probably thinks that.
It doesn't start for an hour I think.
It doesn't start for another hour, yeah.
So no, we're 40 minutes early.
We're early.
Whoa.
Oh, no way.
Oh my goodness.
We are early for like most of the world.
That's fantastic.
Ha ha ha.
We are so good at this, being like online content creators.
Yup.
All right, so we've got a great show for you guys today.
Yeah.
We specifically went out of our way
to avoid talking about it last week.
And the reason was that, honestly,
I just needed a little bit more time
to figure out what the heck was going on here.
The GeForce Partner Program.
On the surface, this looks like some pretty jank,
pretty scummy stuff.
And below the surface,
well, we'll talk about it later.
But I mean, realistically,
if I was gonna say it's all good,
I would have said that before.
Yes.
There was another big news item this week.
Security flaws found in AMD Zen processors from CTS Labs.
Wow, that's been a drama and a half.
So we're gonna-
And I think that even technically started last week too.
Yeah.
But especially this one, super muddy waters last week.
And it's a little bit more clear now.
Like-
Still kind of confusing.
Did you ever play the game at the beach
where you would like stomp
and then you'd get like the kind of Godzilla looking cloud
that comes out around your foot?
And then you'd be like, oh, that was fun, stomp.
And then you would get to the point
where you couldn't really see the cloud anymore
because it's because you just mucked up everything.
So that was last week.
Now we've left it for a few hours
and like we can go sort of stomp around a bit again,
but it's not clear either.
What else we got?
Okay, apparently another Nvidia thing,
they're both just slamming it this week.
Apparently they're gonna announce RTX
or ray tracing technology, which is pretty interesting.
And another company's removing another headphone jack.
No, it's the same headphone jack.
Yeah, that's fair.
Well, I guess it's a different headphone jack.
You know what?
Well, it's the same kind.
Let's just roll the intro.
Yeah.
This video brought to you by Tetra and Brushbox.
Can you eat either of those things?
No, that's a real bummer.
Cause I'm super hungry.
I thought you were like spilling
into a spot for the other guys.
No, no, no, no, no, not really.
I'm sure you can have these.
Oh, I'm not gonna eat Reaper jerky.
Savage jerky is not sponsoring the show.
Like they're right there.
Yeah, they're right there.
And I'd feel better.
Well, first I'd feel worse, then I'd feel better.
And then I'd feel much worse.
All right, why don't we jump into the news?
This is gonna be like a not very many topics,
but a very long time.
Yeah, I'm not ready for the G-Force partner program.
Are we jumping to that?
Not yet.
Yeah, let's talk about something kind of trivial.
Taking the easy fish first.
Wow, you and I are gonna have to play.
What's going on?
We're gonna have to play share the power adapter
over the next little bit here.
Oh.
Because I've only got 10%, but that's okay.
I'm gonna, oh, I'm on battery saver already.
Well, okay then, I'm gonna turn down
my screen brightness a bit.
Okay, Sony removed the headphone jack
from the Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact.
They outlined the details of why they did this
in their blog.
This was originally posted on the forum by Die Hard Live.
Would you mind doing a circle?
Die Hard to Live, Die Hard to Live.
Yeah, I can do a straw poll, heck yeah.
Do you even consider Sony phones when buying a phone?
That is a fantastic straw poll.
Would you consider a Sony phone?
Now, here in North America, Sony's market share is like,
This is one of the reasons why I wanna do this poll though,
because we don't necessarily have
just a North American audience.
Exactly.
We'll be a little skewed, because we're live right now.
Yeah.
If this was the, if we were able to get these results
from the YouTube audience, I think it would be different
than what it's going to be now.
Someday, when we're streaming on Floatplane,
and that stream can then go,
we could have like perpetual polling.
That like sits right under the video.
That would be super cool.
That would totally work.
I mean, yeah, it's all sort of theoretical at this point,
because Floatplane is not particularly fully featured
at the moment.
That's fair.
Last week.
I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything.
Last week hit a little deep.
That comment's fair though.
Yeah.
Okay, so I've gone ahead,
I've dropped the straw poll in there,
but this was originally posted on the forum
by Die Hard to Live.
And they basically outlined the two reasons
for removing the headphone jack
that subjectively are probably about the worst reasons
that you could do anything.
And contribute to,
in my opinion-
Oh my God, was that actually,
okay, I haven't read their two reasons before.
Was that actually it?
Or did we just like come up with that?
Contribute to probably why I think,
probably why the straw poll results
will be what I think they will be.
So it's not good.
Let's go ahead and pull up the results here.
Would you consider a Sony phone?
Remember, we didn't say, would you buy a Sony phone?
We said, would you even consider one?
Would you even think about it at all?
We've got 26% of you saying yes,
74% of you saying no,
and only 500 of you even bothering to vote,
which is some pretty low numbers
for these WAN show straw polls.
Which I'm gonna put that category as a,
wow, I really don't care.
And no one is even still voting.
Like the results aren't even rolling in anymore.
Oh wait, yes they are.
Oh, oh.
And it's died off pretty hard at 635.
It died off pretty hard.
It's like still kind of going, but not too much.
Okay, so here are the reasons
that Sony outlined for making this decision.
And you gotta remember,
the strong opinion on this would be a yes.
Anyone thinking no, like it's kind of effort
for them to be like, yeah, no.
So like there's probably a way higher percentage of people
that actually wouldn't consider, but anyway.
Reason number one, it looks more sleek without it.
So by that logic,
a human would probably look more sleek without an anus,
but you probably shouldn't remove it.
Reason number two.
I thought you were gonna hold it together on that one,
but you couldn't.
No, not quite.
Reason number two, other companies are doing it.
Oh, so painful.
Now, in fairness-
Is that actually what they said?
In fairness to Sony, in fairness to Sony,
hold on a second.
Okay, look, do you want me to read the whole thing?
This is part of the shift
to our new ambient flow design language.
In order to create the beautiful seamless design,
our designers needed to remove the headphone jack.
Plus we were aware of the major market trend
towards wireless headphones over wired headphones.
So yes.
They literally did say that.
They literally did say that.
Oh.
So, okay.
In fairness to Sony, in defense of Sony,
something that I'm not 100% sure if they deserve right now.
No one cares about their phones anyways.
No, that is not what I was going to say.
To be clear there, I was also kidding.
In fairness to Sony,
I never set the announcement video live.
I was trying to figure out
why so few people are watching.
I used to like their phones
until we had so many of them just bend in half.
Yeah.
Well, two, I think.
Three?
Burkle's, mine, yours.
Burkle's did too?
Yeah.
Oh, I didn't even know that.
Yeah.
How do you manage to do that?
It was a compact.
The compacts have the same issue as just less likely.
It was just Burkle.
He's an action man.
Probably more actiony in his pants.
Wow, I meant like, wow.
Okay, actually my defense of Sony
is actually worse than anything you said.
In Tony's defense, the last time they tried
to do something really innovative
that was probably really expensive
from an R&D perspective.
Cause remember Sony was the one
that made waterproof mainstream.
That was cool.
That was very cool.
That's why I used to really like their phone.
And then they still didn't manage
to sell more phones because of it.
But that's a whole other issue.
The last time they tried to do something
they were the first to have a 4K display.
Now creating a 4K mobile display.
You guys got to understand
when you have a feature on your phone
let's say OnePlus launches a 2560 by 1080 mobile display.
OnePlus did not go and get that freaking panel created.
They're a relatively small player.
And when you're a relatively small player
doing relatively small volume
you don't get to walk up to Samsung's display division
or LG or a UO or Phillips or whoever it is.
You don't get to walk up and be like, yo
we need a custom skew.
It needs to have this color gamut, this response time.
It needs to be this size at this resolution.
They're gonna laugh you out of their office.
You get to do that when you're Apple, when you're Samsung
believe it or not Apple's notch display
was custom created just for them
because until Apple did it, of course, after Apple does it
which ties into Sony's other reason.
Of course, other people want it, but until Apple did it
nobody else was gonna want that.
Okay.
So Sony would have had to actually create
a 4K mobile display in that form factor for that phone
that quite honestly, they probably didn't sell a ton of
based on our straw poll results.
And also you can just Google it.
And just see like the people around you
what phones are using.
So they didn't, yeah.
When's the last time you saw one.
Yeah.
So Sony didn't probably get a great ROI
on that particular, you know
breaking the mold kind of investment.
Although even then giving them credit
for breaking the mold in that way is not entirely fair
because they were just following an overall market trend.
They were just trying to get out ahead of it
in a way that was totally meaningless and stupid.
Yes. And almost never even worked anyways
the phone ran in default 1080P almost all the time.
And then you'd like view a picture that was in 4K
and you'd have to wait a second.
And then it would just like, and then change resolution.
It was really weird.
It was very odd.
Almost everything ran at 1080P, but anyways.
So I can see how they don't want to take any risks
because you have to move a lot of devices
to make up for any kind of R and D investment
beyond just even the basics.
But I'm just, I'm disappointed.
I was thrilled to see that Samsung still
had the headphone Jack on the S9 and S9+.
I think that, you know what?
Yeah, the mainstream is moving to wireless
but Samsung is going to sell some handsets just for that.
And I really hope that they do get rewarded for it.
Yeah. All right.
What do we got for our next topic here?
Should we get into the Nvidia thing?
They're just all big, deep ones.
I just have such a headache.
There's this thing.
If you want to go pretty light and easy.
No, no, let's just, let's just get this out of the way.
Okay. So the GeForce partner program
this was originally posted on the forum.
This is actually an 11 page topic over on our forum
and it was posted by WM Groom AK
and this lady or gentlemen, whichever it is.
Okay. Let's go ahead and get the screenshot going on here.
Basically read an article over on hard OCP
from Kyle Bennett and said this,
found all of this interesting if his reporting checks out
because basically, and this is sort of the problem.
This came to light from AMD
bringing some of the details of what's called
the GeForce partners program or GPP to his attention.
And you got to look at that's yeah.
You got to look at no matter who it is.
Like I get that whoever you're a fan boy of
whether it's AMD or Intel or Nvidia
I get that there's this like tribalism thing
that's wired into us as human beings.
And when someone else does it, it's the worst.
And when we do it
it's just us getting back at them for being bad people.
But you got to understand that any time
any company brings something to your attention.
Oh, hey, have you noticed them doing this?
There's an agenda at play.
There's room for spin.
Almost every action is selfish
whether it's helpful to other people or not.
There's some amount of element that is usually selfish
which is okay in a lot of cases
but it's just something to be aware of.
Yes, it's you got to live your life
sort of thinking about that in everything that you do.
So the basic summary is that the story began
when several sites, including hard OCP
were alerted to the goings on by AMD.
In a blog post from March 1st
Nvidia outlined their new GeForce partner program
which ostensibly helps consumers identify brands
that deliver the GeForce promise
of delivering the best PC gaming platform bar none.
So let's go ahead and pull up Nvidia's blog post
that Nvidia is very good at this.
Oops, there we go.
Let's pull up Nvidia's blog post
that Nvidia is so good at this.
Sort of puts it in the shiniest possible terms
what they're doing here.
This is the headline.
The GeForce partner program helps gamers
know what they're buying.
Oh boy, I was having trouble figuring out
what I was buying before.
I'm sure glad that I know now.
Wasn't it like last stream
we talked about how confusing Intel SKUs are?
Yeah.
Graphiskart SKUs are not a huge problem on the Nvidia side.
Yeah, actually.
And even on the AMD side.
Yeah, it's pretty straightforward.
They're not that bad.
Higher number is more better.
There was a little bit of confusingness
for a section there, but it's kind of fine.
The first number is the generation
and then beyond that higher is more better.
I think it got a little bit confusing on the AMD side
when we had like Fury and Nano.
Actually no, Nvidia does have some stupid BS
going on right now where the three gig
and the six gig version of the 1060
are actually different cards.
Yeah, yeah, that's fair.
So hold on a second.
Well, wait a minute.
Is Nvidia rescuing us from themselves?
Is that what's happening right now?
We also had that stuff where the Titan XP
and the Titan XPP, that was not.
Okay, that was really annoying.
That wasn't great either.
That was really annoying.
Especially when the whole community
nicknamed the first one the XP
and then they called their next one the XP.
Okay, okay.
So fine, okay, fine.
You know what?
Then let's play Nvidia Advocate.
Go wait.
Let's play Nvidia Advocate
and say they did need to do something
about this confusing industry.
So let's have a look at what they said.
Oh man.
Wow, this starts off horrible.
Like right within the first two lines.
The GPU and software of a gaming PC
make all the difference in a gamer's experience.
And together with our add-in card and system partners
we're dedicated to building
the best PC gaming platform bar none.
This is the GeForce Promise.
Partner program is designed to ensure
that gamers have full transparency
into the GPU platform and software they're being sold.
Now I'm a let you finish, but.
Do you ever read stuff that just makes you like tired?
I'm doing it right now.
I'm sure where you were going with that.
Yeah.
I'm a let you finish, but.
There was no ambiguity here.
There's already marketing incentives.
And in some cases, like basically an arm
twisted behind the back like this,
where Nvidia really has a lot of control over the badges
that are put on, for example, a product box
or in the case of add-in cards, even the overall design.
Like you could take a picture
from the side of an entire shelf of cards
made by MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, EVGA
and all the Nvidia ones would be basically the same.
Yeah, they're really similar.
Because Nvidia has mandated
and they have lots of levers they can pull
to control their partners.
But Nvidia has mandated
that they need to kind of look like this.
And the levers that they can pull include pricing,
allocation of the hot parts that actually sell,
partner support.
So things like providing engineering support
for your custom boards, access, early access to the parts.
So you can begin development ahead of other guys
and effectively launch it.
All this kind of stuff has existed forever
and it's like totally kind of fine.
Kind of.
Kind of.
There's some issues in some realms,
but most of it is fairly standard practice.
Okay, fine is a relative term.
Most of this is fairly standard practice
for a lot of different industries.
Yeah, depending on how it's done.
So the thing is that we get a lot of sort of feedback
from our community that the perception is
that we're sort of like friends of Nvidia.
But the reality of it is we're not friends with anybody.
We are a business and we have business partnerships.
And from a product perspective,
we like Nvidia products just fine.
From a sort of how we perceive their reputation
within the industry, we have some misgivings.
Ones that we have brought to light in the past.
Particularly, actually I think probably
the most recent example is the 1066 gig and three gig.
That's an extremely recent example.
We didn't like the way they did that.
Well, I mean, like we mentioned at this show,
but there's also the recent change to GeForce experience.
Yes, we've also mentioned that.
Which was like, we put them on blast for that
and I still don't install it
and I still don't recommend it.
And while I am not always at liberty to talk about,
especially the sources of the frustration with Nvidia,
that takes place behind the scenes.
There's a lot of it that we're aware of
and there's a lot of arm twisting.
And think about it, Nvidia is like the partner
that stands there posing for a picture with you
and has their foot on your toe.
Yeah, being like smile properly, man.
That's the perception that I get a lot of the time.
Come say hi.
So let's continue reading about the GeForce promise here.
This transparency into what you're buying
is only possible when Nvidia brands
and partner brands are consistent.
So the new program means that we'll be promoting
our GPP partner brands across the web
on social media at events and more.
So this sounds like, oh, Nvidia is doing great things
for their partners.
GPP partners will also get early access
to our latest innovations and work closely
with our engineering team
to bring the newest technologies to gamers.
Partners are signing up fast.
They see the benefit of keeping brands
and communication consistent and transparent.
Does this not have like a, which Harry Potter movie is it
where Umbridge takes over as the professor,
the prim and proper lady who turns out to be
like an absolute monster.
I don't know the name of it,
but I think it's the second last one.
Yeah, I don't remember.
Anyway, it's not really important.
The point is, does this not have like kind of a rules
for proper behavior as students kind of vibe to it?
The program isn't exclusive.
Partners continue to have the ability to sell
and promote products from anyone.
Partners choose to sign up for the program
and they can stop participating at any time.
There's no commitment to make any monetary payments
or product discounts for being part of the program.
GPP ensures our engineering and marketing efforts
support brands consumers associate with GeForce.
That transparency will give gamers the confidence needed
to make their purchase, whichever products they choose.
Now I don't often feel the need to read out
an entire press release from a company
because a lot of the time, frankly,
I feel like companies should pay me
to read their stupid press release.
Like honestly, press releases, that's not journalism.
That's not objective, that's advertising.
They literally pay someone to write it
and then they pay like market wire to distribute it.
That's what it is.
Okay, so on the surface, this sounds like everything
about this is voluntary and terrific,
but let's look at the state of the GPU market right now.
If you can get GPUs, you are making bank
because of the whole cryptocurrency mining thing
and pent up demand from gamers
who haven't been able to get GPUs
because of the cryptocurrency mining thing.
If you can't get GPUs, you are basically plumb out of luck
and Nvidia, without doing anything
that could open them up to a lawsuit,
can plausibly say, we just didn't have enough for you.
You were on the list, sorry.
And if you're, let's say someone like EVGA, for example,
you have other businesses, you sell motherboards,
you sell-
Crazy, ridiculously high-waters power supplies.
Yeah, you sell power supplies, you sell cases even.
But let's be honest, when's the last time
you saw an EVGA motherboard out in the wild?
So they sell motherboards, but do they sell a lot of them?
Compared to someone like an Asus or a Gigabyte,
no, not really.
And that isn't to say that they're bad boards,
that's just to say that they aren't as popular
and that EVGA's business is very reliant on GPUs.
So if EVGA couldn't get allocation of GPUs
to say that their business would suffer,
would be a gross understatement.
So Nvidia's blog post outlining how
this is all very voluntary,
it just ensures that they get the benefits
of being part of the partner program,
it comes across a little bit disingenuous
because that's not what's going on here.
What's going on is that
if you don't join the partner program,
you're not gonna get allocation
and your business is going to suffer
and you're gonna have to lay off real people
with real families who won't have a job anymore
and won't be able to support them.
And that's something that if I'm a company like EVGA,
that for the most part,
my experience with them has actually been very positive.
I would like to believe that they care about.
So you're pretty much joining the GeForce partner program.
So let's go to the hard OCP article.
A huge shout out to Kyle for doing what he was doing here.
So hard OCP began interviewing AIBs and OEMs.
I'm gonna reshare this in Twitch chat
because I showed it a while ago.
Yeah, go ahead, hit Twitch chat with that,
it's really important.
So they began interviewing AIBs and OEMs
who communicated a few things.
One, that the GeForce partner program has terms in it
that are likely illegal.
Number two, that the GeForce partner program
is going to likely tremendously hurt consumer choice.
And number three, that the GeForce partner program
will disrupt business with companies
that are currently doing business with AMD,
in particular, AMD and Intel.
The other thing that he gleaned
and we haven't been able to verify this
because here's what you guys got to understand.
I've never seen the agreement.
And I know for a fact, I will never see the agreement.
It would shock me if anyone ever saw this agreement
out in the public.
But what I know about agreements like this
is that let's say, for example,
that a gag order was done in an illegal fashion.
Let's say I made you sign some kind of an agreement
that says-
This is a very spicy agreement.
Yeah, spicy agreement, okay?
If you talk about this agreement, I will kill you.
And you will authorize me to kill you.
Oh.
Okay?
Obviously illegal.
But let's say it wasn't murder.
Let's say it was something
slightly less black and white than that.
Like I'll kill your company.
Yeah, like that.
Which to a lot of people is kind of close.
Yeah, I mean, people have committed suicide
over their company's failing.
That's what I mean, yeah.
So let's say that it was something like that.
You could break the agreement at some point,
but until you fight me in court
and prove that depending on the way it's wording,
because expensive lawyers can do expensive lawyer things,
depending on the way it's worded,
the onus could be on you to prove
that you don't owe me whatever it was.
So your business could effectively be destroyed
in the years and after the money
that it costs you to fight me.
So even though I have an illegal term
and I have a potentially illegal punishment for it,
you don't wanna be the one who steps out of line
because I can punish you in the meantime
in ways that would destroy you
to the point where it would never matter
if what I did was illegal
because you wouldn't even exist to take a payout anymore
five years, 10 years down the road
when you would be in a position to finally get your payout.
Now that is a real possibility
and I'm not saying that I know that that's what's happening,
but what I do know
is that nobody is coughing up this agreement
and I do know that agreements like this do exist.
Okay, so with all of that in mind, further information
that Hart OCP is publishing alleges
that the G-Force Partner Program-
And I think, okay, to,
I'm not disagreeing with anything that you're saying,
but to play a little bit of both sides.
Oh, I know, I know.
But to play a little bit of both sides,
alleges is a pretty important word here.
Like, there's a lot of-
This is all according to Kyle Bennett's article on Hart OCP.
And a lot of it makes sense.
And I'm explaining how it could make sense,
but because- And it lines up pretty okay,
but like-
Okay, yeah, so thank you.
Yeah.
Are you our legal department?
That's it.
I was sort of at one point.
Long time ago.
But- Okay, I don't want to talk about those things.
We were dark times.
But like, yeah, I just want to make sure that's clear
because while all of this may make sense
and all that kind of stuff,
it's not technically complete.
It's all alleges.
Okay, so Kyle's article further alleges
that in order to have access
to the G-Force Partner Program,
partners must have their own gaming brand
aligned exclusively with G-Force.
Now think about that for a minute,
because that's been a huge trend
over the last 10 years or so.
I think ROG just celebrated its 10-year anniversary
with the Rampage 5 Extreme.
They had a 10-year anniversary edition of that board.
And ROG was one of the, to ASUS's credit,
this was, ASUS doesn't always get marketing right.
But to ASUS's credit, they built the ROG brand
when I called it a stupid idea way back in the day.
So kudos to them and the rest of the industry
basically was playing follow the leader.
And that's, yeah, I would also say
they have nailed it quite a few times.
ASUS's ROG, Gigabyte's AORUS,
Lenovo's Legion, who else do we have?
Dell's XPS or Alienware to a greater extent.
XPS is less gaming these days.
It used to be Dell's gaming brand.
I feel like Legion has been having more of an issue
getting its-
Well, they just launched.
That's fair.
Like CES 15 months ago or something like that.
So give them some time.
But it also alleges that all of these brands
will have to be exclusively aligned with GeForce.
So even though Nvidia's blog post says,
partners continue to have the ability
to sell and promote products from anyone,
the GPP documentation allegedly says
that those who do not participate will lose benefits
like high effort engineering engagements,
early tech engagement, launch partner status,
game bundling, sales rebate programs.
I'll get back to that one.
Social media and PR support,
marketing reports and marketing development funds.
So let's get back to sales rebate programs
and marketing development funds for a minute here.
That's huge.
The way the tech industry works,
and there's a reason for it,
because if you gave every mom and pop computer shop
a $1 discount, they would take it straight to price
and sell the product for cheaper.
Which as a consumer, you might go, wow, that's great.
But it isn't necessarily,
because we talked about this previously
when Intel wasn't providing the support
that we feel like they should
on their previous generation chipsets
in terms of patching for Spectre and Meltdown.
The problem with just charging the bear amount
is that it doesn't give you the business
war chest that you need to, well, to go to war
in the event that you have to.
And it's one of those things
where it kind of relies on a business
to behave in a manner that is in good faith
acting in the consumer's best interest,
but a business that is making a healthy profit
is in a better position to, as an extreme example,
still exist a year later
when you come back for warranty support.
You actually need the companies that you buy things from
to make a profit.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
The problem with the IT industry
is that it tends to be, and it's kind of a cultural thing,
I'm not gonna get any deeper into it than that,
but it tends to be a race to zero industry.
Volume, volume, volume,
take down as much margin as you can
so you can take the volume
that your competitor would have been doing,
force them under, and then someday we'll raise the prices.
Yeah.
And you do eventually see that.
Like the hard drive industry
enjoyed a short period of great margins
when basically everyone was gone
and then they were supplanted by the SSD industry
in the mainstream.
And to be clear, hard drives are still doing fine
in the cloud.
They're not going away or anything,
but that business is a B2B business
which tends to be lower margin.
So there was like a golden hour there
for the hard drive industry.
Here, do you need this?
Yeah, go for it.
Thank you.
Right.
So the way that the tech industry works
is that the pricing is fixed.
You just say, okay, look, a Core i5-8600K, that's $200 US.
And then the way that you actually provide promotions
or the way that you make someone like a formerly,
so when I worked at NCIX,
the way that NCIX was able to differentiate
from mom and pop shops was not the sticker price.
It was the backend support
because every CPU we sold,
we got a couple of percentage kickback
at the end of a quarter.
And every CPU we sold, well, during Black Friday,
we might get five bucks or 10 bucks off.
Now all of a sudden, mom and pop,
in order to compete with us, have to sell below cost,
giving us an advantage.
That's the way that you actually stay competitive.
And to be clear, this isn't some kind of like
subversive cloak and dagger nonsense
because within sort of the mainstream stores
that you shop at, Best Buy, Newegg,
I mean, okay, some of these are kind of dated reference,
the Tiger Direct, Memory Express, Canada Computers,
Micro Center, Amazon,
the programs are basically across the board pretty similar.
And whenever someone finds out that they got a pro,
that someone else got a program that they didn't,
there's outrage.
And usually the brand ends up kind of doing something
to make it up to you.
And then the other guy complains about that.
It's all negotiations, it's business as usual.
Now the problem here is that with GPUs in particular,
Nvidia maintains a lot of control
over the pricing at every level to the partners
and to the end users through tools
like these kinds of rebates.
So they sell the chip set to the vendor at some price X,
but then Nvidia could decide a week later to go,
well, you know what, here's a sell through rebate,
effectively lowering the price
without actually lowering the sticker price,
meaning that someone who has a multi-week,
in some cases lead time between acquiring chips
and then turning them into boards,
delivering them to retailers
and eventually selling through them
might effectively have a bunch of stock
that's overpriced now
and no real recourse for getting rid of it.
And so it's at Nvidia's discretion
to support you to get rid of it.
Which is a fairly strong but indirect way
to sort of choke out a company.
That's right.
So game bundling, MDF and sales rebate programs
are basically like saying,
you'll never make money on graphics cards again
if you were to remove all that stuff.
Yeah.
Okay.
I forget where we were going with this,
but partner brand aligned exclusively with Nvidia,
partners have the ability to sell
and promote products from anyone,
but allegedly this behind the scenes documentation
says they'll get all of this support cut.
And to be clear,
the public documentation doesn't say any of that.
Okay.
Hard OCP has been told
that if a company does not participate in GPP,
they feel-
Not by Nvidia.
Yeah.
As if Nvidia would hold back allocation of GPUs
from their inventories.
This has not been spelled out contractually,
but the feeling is that it's done on a wink and a nod.
To be fair,
they said that the stuff we just mentioned,
losing all these different things,
was in the documentation.
This is a feeling.
Yeah, the allocation bit is a feeling.
And then the next part that we're gonna talk about
is also a feeling.
Yeah.
So it was expressed to Hard OCP
that publishing that article
could damage Hard OCP's relationship with Nvidia.
Which knowing-
Well, we've gotten to the end of it now.
I guess we're in the same boat.
Yeah.
Oh, look at that.
But knowing and like, okay,
to jump all the way back
to the beginning of this conversation,
in terms of like there's always,
there's very extremely, massively often,
I'm not gonna say always
because someone's gonna call me on that in some weird way,
but there's basically always a selfish reason for everything
whether the selfish reason is tiny or huge, whatever,
saying, hey, if you release this, Nvidia's gonna be mad.
Saying that to Hard OCP
was probably pushing them to release it.
Then again, maybe not.
Kyle's been in the industry a long time
and he's deeply connected.
They may have actually had his best interest at heart.
Possibly, but from articles
that I've read from him before too,
no issue pushing that kind of stuff.
But let's take the helicopter up another thousand feet
and let's go, why were they talking to him at all?
Yeah.
Yeah, seriously, yeah.
So the particular warning
might've been in Kyle's best interest,
but the fact that they're talking to him at all
is probably in their own best interest.
And I'm sure they know that he likes juicy articles.
And also for the consumer's best interest, potentially,
because remember, there could be a selfish kernel,
but that doesn't mean that it doesn't benefit
a whole bunch of people
and that you couldn't- We just don't know how much.
Rationalize the benefit you're providing to yourself
by saying, well, it also helps out all these other guys.
Which is great in a lot of situations.
That's honestly mostly how charity works,
but you just don't know how much,
how much of this is helping other people,
how much of this is helping.
And for Kyle to talk about how this article
could damage the relationship with Nvidia,
you can find a selfish kernel there too.
By saying that, he's adding credibility
to his own publication by saying, you know what?
I'm willing to risk damaging my relationship with Nvidia
in order to bring you guys the facts.
And in this case, this actually does look to me,
and I haven't seen the partner agreement,
and I won't admit to having talked to anyone
about this behind the scenes,
but this looks to me like it actually does
have the potential to damage a relationship with Nvidia.
Nvidia is, well, it comes back to the portrait.
Nvidia smiles a lot,
and they talk about partnership a lot.
And what they mean is they have expectations
of their partners, and if their partners don't meet them,
oh, hmm, hmm, hmm.
That's my perception.
And a lot of people think that we're like super,
super chummy with Nvidia,
but I've said before in the past, and I'll say it again now,
we have done a grand total
of three sponsored engagements with Nvidia.
We did some pre-rolls way back when we first started,
and those were actually, that was a complicated thing
because probably none of you even remember them.
It was 10 spots,
and they were all for a particular EVGA graphics card,
but the funding was being passed through via MDF
from Nvidia, so that one hardly even registers.
Number two, we went down to California
and hosted Mod24, their modding event.
We were paid what I consider to be a very modest fee
for that kind of an engagement.
And then number three,
this was the first time they had actually done
flat out a sponsored video with us ever.
They did something with us in Q4
talking about how to game at 4K.
They were actually pretty easy to work with,
which was kind of refreshing
because we were able to talk about game consoles as well.
We kept it very objective, and we told them upfront,
we were like, look, we never actually work with you guys
on sponsored stuff,
but there's this perception that we're in your pocket,
so you gotta understand.
We're gonna have to approach this very carefully.
And they were actually pretty cool about it,
but that's the extent of it.
We have worked far more extensively with AMD, Intel, ASUS.
I think we've done more stuff with MSI.
I mean, certainly more stuff with the regular partners
like Squarespace.
ZOTAC, we haven't really done much big stuff with.
But we've done, actually, yeah,
we've done a fair bit with ZOTAC.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, like most people.
So there you go.
So are we putting ourselves at risk?
Given that the relationship was finally starting to warm up
and we were really getting some stuff done,
like a dedicated sponsored video with us
is one of the biggest things that a partner can do with us.
And we finally did one with them.
Given things were starting to warm up,
yes, we're putting ourselves at risk,
but given that our business survived just fine
for the five years prior to that, no, it's not a ton.
So we're not gonna act like white knights here
or anything like that, but-
Also said allegedly a lot.
We said allegedly a lot because-
And perception.
And that I'm not gonna admit to having talked to anyone.
I'm gonna say this, I haven't talked to anyone.
And I'm also gonna say this,
I'm not always 100% honest with you guys.
So you can read into that, whatever you feel like.
Speaking of honesty-
I wanna add one thing before we jump into sponsor spots.
But one thing I wanna add to you is some of this stuff
is future traceable.
So you'll be able to tell.
Yep.
Just keep that in mind.
Like one of the smart things you can do
if you're trying to keep an agreement under wraps
is you could give everyone slightly different terms.
That's fair, yeah.
And that way, if it came to light,
you could kind of go, okay.
If it was one of them, them, or them,
and then something else came to light,
you could go, it was them.
So even if I knew anything, and I am being honest,
this is honest answers episode, whatever this is,
has Linus seen the agreement?
The answer is no, I have not seen it.
And I have been told by the people
that I would never admit that I have talked to
that I will never see it
and that they will never tell me any details about it.
That actually did happen as well.
Anyone that I won't admit that I talked to
told me they would never show it to me
and they would never tell me the details of it.
So that happened.
So there you go.
Yeah, let's talk about something like not horrible.
Here's Spectrum Glasses.
Hey.
Like my life is far less complicated right now
talking about Spectrum Glasses instead of like stuff
because this is just, it's simple, okay?
If you stare at a monitor all day,
the blue light can be bad for your eyes.
Yeah.
This filters it without having a huge impact
on the color accuracy of the world around you.
And compared to a software solution like Flux or Twilight
is more effective there.
It's also kind of weird.
Like I've got a flux equivalent on my phone.
I don't remember what it's called.
Yeah.
And it's kind of jarring.
Yeah, no, it doesn't work that well.
They're stylish.
They've got tons of different styles to choose from
including ones for kids.
They're high quality.
Like they feel good.
They feel good in the hand.
They got a one year warranty
not just in the hand on your face too.
It's like Spectrum.
It works great in your hand and on your face.
Spectrum, you'll want them in your hand.
You'll want it on your face.
That would actually be an interesting commercial
for them to run.
It's just they like hand people glasses.
They're like, wow, these feel great.
And then they just like, they won't put them on.
Now try putting it on your face.
And the person's like, you should try it on.
And they're like, no, it just, it feels amazing.
So they're primarily focused on the Canadian
and U.S. markets, but they're expanding to Europe
and they offer shipping internationally.
Check them out at spectrumglasses.com
slash collections slash prospect
or at the link right there.
I still think it's pro spec.
Pro spec, I'm sorry.
Like pro and spectacle.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm an idiot.
Use offer code Linus to save 10%.
If I was Spectrum, I would change our offer code
to use offer code idiot.
I would read it.
I would read anything for money.
That's what people think of me.
So I might as well just do it.
Just embrace it.
Speaking of anything for money,
if you're a freelancer or a small business owner
doing whatever it is that you do for money,
FreshBooks is here to help.
FreshBooks is the super simple to use invoicing tool
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They've also got a feature that tells you
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The mobile app has all the functionality
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Go to freshbooks.com slash wan
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and enter wan in the how did you hear about us section.
All right.
One thing.
We did a one topic wan show today.
People are running super hard with the allegedly thing.
Everything's allegedly and I love it.
And then the other thing is people are saying
that the offer code should just be ID 10 D.
Oh yeah, that could work.
It's not a bad offer code.
Pretty good.
I'm hungry enough to eat reaper jerky.
That's pretty epic.
And I'm not being paid by Savage.
That's pretty epic.
Okay.
I'm looking for a sweater.
I don't think I've ever done that from a company before.
I liked their shirt.
I liked the logo on their shirts.
I was like, you guys should make a sweater.
And they replied, they're like, what kind?
A high quality one made from the freshest ingredients.
It tastes great and isn't bad for you, jerky sweater.
Oh my God.
That would be really gross actually.
But like your girlfriend be like,
I can't wait to get that off of you.
And she's just like, no, no, no, no.
It's probably not a good idea.
He, well, he asked if I wanted a hockey sweater
or like a more American style sweater.
And I was like, that, that's a good point.
It'd be kind of interesting to have on it.
Like hockey style, Savage jerky sweater.
That doesn't help.
I got the hiccups.
Yeah.
Water doesn't make it better.
Oh no, oh.
Float plane, do you want to do float plane
while you're all screwed up?
No, do the IMD thing.
Do float plane, do float plane.
No.
Do float plane.
Okay, fine.
I hate you so much.
That was a big bite.
I haven't eaten in a while.
Like you have to build up a,
you have to build up a tolerance.
I'm like straight up crying right now.
Okay.
I thought I did bad last week.
Videos on, videos on float plane.
What are OEMs?
Original equipment manufacturers.
I think everyone's heard this term.
Yeah.
What is it?
We explain.
Cool.
Scraping thermal paste.
Oh, by the way, you're looking at the new layout
of the float plane site.
Yeah.
In order.
Scraping thermal paste.
Is Intel's thermal paste actually that bad?
We got a bag full of processors,
delib them, harvest the thermal paste,
and then use it on a liquid metal CPU
against normal thermal paste.
Cool.
All right.
Nvidia's first SLI gaming setup.
Reconstructed.
Okay.
6800 GTs on a forest board.
We've been working on that for a long time.
Yep.
2000, $2 million clean room.
Drive savers data recovery tour.
You should watch this.
I want to, yeah.
I haven't seen it yet, but I'm really excited.
Tech Wiki, how does eye tracking work?
I saw that thumbnail.
I was like, whoa.
Testing the 56 core system.
Holy bleep.
We don't have bleeping on the WAN show.
This was a simultaneous, or no, this was a short window.
The laptop to buy right now, the LG Gram 2018.
They added Thunderbolt.
Great laptop.
Intel CPU letters explained.
I don't think that's actually on YouTube yet.
And then we do do some exclusive content, not a ton,
but I tested the Nvidia Shield from the NCIX auction.
So no spoilers, but that's over there as well.
And I think that's pretty much it.
I think that's it for us, yeah.
I think that's all we got on there right now.
You're doing pretty good.
Yeah.
You recovered quite a bit.
I have recovered.
Okay.
So let's talk about the next completely AIDS topic.
Posted by coaxial gamer on the forum.
Security flaws discovered in AMD Zen processors.
So this sounds on the surface like,
whoa, either, yeah, you know what?
Depending on what kind of a tinfoil hat you wear,
this could sound like a lot of things.
This could sound like Intel trying to make AMD look bad.
This could sound like AMD actually having security flaws
and like them being all like being up on their high horse
when Intel was dealing with their flaws.
Wow, they're a bunch of jerks.
Or it looks like it may even be possible
that this was an independent group
looking to make AMD stock perform poorly
so they could short it.
So CTS Labs, a security company based in Israel,
announced Tuesday that its researchers
had found 13 critical security vulnerabilities
that would let attackers access data stored
on AMD's Zen family processors,
including Ryzen and even their Epic server processors,
as well as install malware on them.
The vulnerabilities have been put into four groups
called MasterKey, Rise and Fall,
and Fallout and Chimera.
Thankfully, nearly all of these vulnerabilities
require root access in order to be exploited,
but it does get sketchy.
The researchers gave AMD less than 24 hours
to look at the vulnerabilities and respond
before publishing the report.
Now that's not illegal,
but that is not considered to be industry
not being a douche practices.
Yeah, what else we got here?
Standard vulnerability disclosure calls
for at least 90 days so that the companies
have time to address flaws properly.
Google gave Intel six months to fix issues
related to Spectre and Meltdown.
So if it's less than 90 days,
that could be like rivals, like Google and Facebook
being like, I've got your thing.
Yeah, oh, well, you know, we gave you enough time to fix it.
We're going public with this
because it makes them look bad, right?
It doesn't make you look that bad
when a vulnerability goes public
because everyone has issues.
When a vulnerability goes public,
but it's like already fixed.
So if you're trying to cause PR damage to someone,
you might go live in 30 days
so that you could be like,
well, they had a whole month to fix this
and kind of plausibly say that.
24 hours, that's not even enough time to check your email.
In some cases.
The researchers pre-briefed media and a company
that makes money by shorting the stock market
before going live with it.
Viceroy Research published an obituary for AMD
just 30 minutes after CTS Labs
publicized the vulnerabilities.
So this is some sketchy stuff.
Now I'm not saying that these researchers
aren't qualified to do CPU research.
I don't know.
There's been a lot of weird stuff too.
Like people tried to deep dive this
and one of the ones that I saw was like
someone figured out that the backgrounds
and all the videos were stock photos.
So they're like, they don't have real, whatever.
They don't even have a real office
or they may have a real office
but it doesn't look like super pro like that.
Yeah, but at the same time,
if you pay attention to the backgrounds
throughout the videos, at one point in time,
they're like middle frame on a photo
that was taken mostly at the floor.
So like the person would have to be standing
on like a 70 degree angle off the ground this way
for it to be realistic.
Like I don't think they were actually trying to fool people.
Yeah, it was also like a super overproduced
kind of video too.
It had kind of a sleazy vibe to me.
But that's actually not surprising from a company
that's probably not released a video before.
Like a Kickstarter.
Yeah.
Except that the production values were pretty good.
So for some reason they spent money
to make a good looking video,
but here, I think this is it.
Didn't get like a producer.
There's a great article from a reborn.com.
I'm gonna go ahead.
I'll post this for you guys.
Giant banner.
But check this out.
Like this is actually done well.
So they put money into looking like they had an office.
Okay, sort of.
But hold on.
But then.
Look at this one.
That's the floor.
Those servers reflecting on,
this photo is taken from the floor.
It's a reflective floor, I think.
No, no, no.
Oh, I got that wrong.
It's halfway down the server rack.
Yeah.
Nevermind.
So.
All right.
I thought that was the floor right here.
But wait, hold on.
Are you right?
But no, I don't know.
I'm not sure.
I don't, I don't.
This is really reflective polished floor.
But now I kind of think that's just halfway
through the server rack.
Yeah, now I think it's just server racks.
So.
Does it look really, really janky?
Yes.
I guess that's basically all we have to say about that.
Yeah.
So there may actually be security issues.
But.
Yeah.
There also might not be.
Or they also might just be like giant jerks.
All right.
Nvidia's ray tracing thing.
We're like out of time.
Is there anything else that's like absolutely critical
that we have to talk about this week?
I feel so bad.
James spent all day on this doc
and we ended up talking about the Nvidia thing
the whole time.
Famous people play video games.
That's a thing that happens.
That's probably all we really need to say about that.
Yeah.
EA is turning Star Wars Battlefront II into a real game.
Apparently.
I'm a real game.
No, there's no one cares.
The progression is now linear.
Star cards or any other item impacting gameplay
can only be earned through gameplay.
Will not be available for purchase.
So basically they made their money I guess?
Or people stopped playing I guess.
One of the two.
Starting in April you'll be able to get appearances
directly through in game credits or crystals.
All they need to do is make it
Star Wars Battlefront II Battlegrounds.
Or Battle Royale.
Or Battle Extravaganza.
And then they'll make all their money back.
Yeah.
They're gonna be rolling out a bunch of new mods
over the coming months.
Cool.
So there you go.
Get that and you'll do great.
Twitch Prime now offers free games every month.
Amazon just like spending that money, hey?
Pretty nuts.
Wow.
Apparently games for March 6th to April 3rd
will be super hot which is actually amazing.
If you haven't played it yet, great game.
Oxen Free Shadow Tactics, Mr. Shifty,
and Tales from Candlekeep, Tomb of Annihilation.
Next month will be Tales from the Borderlands,
SteamWorld Dig 2, Kingsway, Tokyo 42, and Dub Wars.
Much like Humble Bundles, I would be surprised
if these stay awesome.
And it will, okay, it also looks kinda like
they've got one more headliner game in each one.
And then some other ones which may or may not be cool
but I'm not super familiar with them.
Twitch Prime is included with Amazon Prime by the way.
So I mean, I already would have recommended
an Amazon Prime membership.
So I guess I recommended a little tiny bit more.
Yeah.
At the same time, if you don't want the entire world
to be taken over, maybe consider not buying Prime.
Broadcom is not buying Qualcomm anymore
because the US government blocked it.
It's official.
And SpaceX is trying to reach Mars in 2019.
Go SpaceX.
Cool.
Thanks for watching The Wham Show.
See you again next week.
Same bad time, same bad channel.
Bye.
The Wham Show, like 40 minutes of one thing
and then like, oh, by the way, some other stuff.
Like the timestamps this week
are gonna be like four things.
Giant, yeah, yeah.
Wow, we got a lot of viewership this week.
We should like do more exposés on Nvidia.
I mean, I can't really think of anything at the moment.
Are you guys super, all the Twitch viewers,
are you guys super excited for the super click baity
thumbnail and title on YouTube?
Go to LTX.
Yeah.
Oh, we didn't do that.