The damage that AMD marketing does

Some of you may have have seen the actions of a user that goes by the name of Redneckerz on a recent blogpost of mine. That guy posts one wall of text after the next, full of anti-nVidia rhetoric, shameless AMD-promotion, and an endless slew of personal attacks and fallacies.

He even tries to school me on what I may or may not post on my own blog, and how I should conduct myself. Which effectively comes down to me having to post *his* opinions. I mean, really? This is a *personal* blog. Which means that it is about the topics that *I* want to discuss, and I will give *my* opinion on them. You don’t have to agree with that, and that is fine. You don’t have to visit my blog if you don’t like to read what I have to say on a given topic. In fact, I even allow people to comment on my blogs, and they are free to express their disagreements.

But there are limits. You can express your disagreements once, twice, perhaps even three times. But at some point, when I’ve already given off several warnings that we are not going to ‘discuss’ this further, and keep things on-topic, you just have to stop. If not, I will just make you stop by removing (parts of) your comments that are off-limits. After all, nobody is waiting for people to endlessly spew the same insults, and keep making the same demands. It’s just a lot of noise that prevents other people from having a pleasant discussion (and before you call me a hypocrit, I may delete the umpteenth repeat of a given post, but I left the earlier ones alone, so it’s not like I don’t allow you to express your views at all).

In fact, I think even without the insults, the endless walls of text that Redneckerz produces are annoying enough. He keeps repeating himself everywhere. And that is not just my opinion. Literally all other commenters on that item have expressed their disapproval of Redneckerz’ posting style (which is more than a little ironic, given the fact that at least part of Redneckerz’ agenda is to try and paint my posting style as annoying and unwanted).

Speaking about the feedback of other users, they also called him out on having an agenda, namely promoting AMD. Which seems highly likely, given the sheer amount of posts he fires off, and the fact that their content is solely about promoting AMD and discrediting nVidia.

The question arose mainly whether he was just a brainwashed victim of AMD’s marketing, or whether AMD would actually be compensating him for the work he puts in. Now, as you can tell from the start of the ‘conversation’, this was not my first brush with Redneckerz. I had encountered him on another forum some time ago, and things went mostly the same. He attacked me in various topics where I contributed, in very much the same way as here: an endless stream of replies with walls-of-text, and poorly conceived ideas. At some point he would even respond to other people, mentioning my name and speculating what my reply would have been. However, I have not had contact with him since, and Redneckerz just came to my blog out of the blue, and started posting like a maniac here. One can only speculate what triggered him to do that at this moment (is it a coincidence that both nVidia and AMD are in the process of launching their new 16nm GPU lineups?)

Now, if Redneckerz was just a random forum user, we could leave it at that. But in fact, he is an editor for a Dutch gaming website, Gamed.nl: http://www.gamed.nl/editors/215202

That makes him a member of the press, so the plot thickens… I contacted that website, to inform them that one of their editors had gone rampant on my blog and other forums, and that they might want to take action, because it’s not exactly good publicity for their site either. I got some nonsensical response about how they were not responsible for what their editors post on other sites. So I replied that this isn’t about who is responsible, but what they could do is talk some sense into him, for the benefit of us all.

Again, they were hiding behind the ‘no responsibility’-guise. So basically they support his conduct. Perhaps they are in on the same pro-AMD thing that he is, whatever that is exactly.

I’ve already talked about that before, in general, in my blog related to the release of DirectX 12. About how the general public is being played by AMD, developers and journalists. Things like Mantle, async compute, HBM, how AMD allegedly has an advantage in games because they supply console APUs and whatnot. This nonsense has become so omnipresent that people think this is actually the reality. Even though benchmarks and sales figures prove the opposite (eg, nVidia’s GTX960 and GTX970 are the most popular cards among Steam users by a margin: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/).

Just like we have to listen to people claiming Polaris is going to save AMD. Really? The writing is already on the wall: AMD’s promotional material showed us a slides with two all-important bits of information:

First, we see them compare against the GeForce GTX970/980. Secondly, we see them stating a TDP of 150W. So, the performance-target will probably be between GTX970 and GTX980 (and the TFLOPS rating also indicates that ballpark). And the power envelope will be around 150W. They didn’t just put these numbers on there at random. The low-balling pricetag is also a tell-tale sign. AMD is not a charitable organization. They’re in this business to make money. They don’t sell their cards at $199 to make us happy. They sell them at $199 because they’ve done the maths and $199 will be their sweet-spot for regaining marketshare and getting enough profit. Desperately trying to keep people from buying more of those GTX960/970/980 cards until AMD gets their new cards on the market. If they had a killer architecture, they’d charge a premium because they could get away with. nVidia should have little trouble matching that price/performance-target with their upcoming 1050/1060.

Which matches exactly with how I described the situation AMD is in: they are one ‘refresh’ behind on nVidia, architecture-wise, since they ‘skipped’ Maxwell, where nVidia concentrated on maximizing performance/watt, since they were still stuck at 28 nm. I said that it would be too risky for AMD to do the shrink to 16 nm and at the same time, also do a major architectural overhaul. So it would be unlikely for AMD to completely close the gap that nVidia had opened with Maxwell. And that appears to be what we see with Polaris. When I said it, I was accused of being overly negative towards AMD. In fact, Kyle Bennett of HardOCP said basically the same thing. And he was also met by a lot of pro-AMD people who attacked him. After AMD released their information on Polaris however, things went a bit quiet on that side. We’ll have to wait for the actual release and reviews at the end of this month, but the first signs don’t point to AMD having an answer to match Pascal.

The sad part is that it always has to go this way. You can’t say anything about AMD without tons of people attacking you. Even if it’s the truth. Remember John Fruehe? Really guys, I’m trying to do everyone a favour by giving reliable technical info, instead of marketing BS. I can do that, because I actually have a professional background in the field, and have a good hands-on understanding of CPU internals, GPU internals, rendering algorithms and APIs. Not because I’m being paid to peddle someone’s products, no matter how good or bad they are.

In fact, a lot of the comments I make aren’t so much about AMD’s products themselves, but rather about their inflated and skewed representation in the media.

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