A Familiar Story
It's deja vu for Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD). A decade after Intel (INTC) purportedly utilized anti competitive business practices to hamstring AMD, Nvidia (NVDA) is reportedly taking a page out of the same playbook with its GeForce Partner Program ("GPP"). Those add-in-board ("AIB") and OEM suppliers that join GPP get exclusive benefits, which I'll expand on later, and required in return is that partners exclusively market GeForce cards under certain gaming brands (I'll expand on this later as well). If the reporting about GPP's alleged anti-competitive implications are accurate, could this hurt competition in the graphics industry at the expense of AMD and consumer choice?
Nvidia Pulls A Page From Intel's Playbook?
This article discusses news that has largely flown under the radar in recent weeks, mainly due to the reluctance of Nvidia and other companies in the industry to answer questions about GPP, so I'll give an overview of the topic before we get into the analysis.
Most of the discussion surrounding the potentially negative impacts of GPP has been driven by a March 8 article published on HardOCP and written by Kyle Bennett.
Bennett starts out with an important disclosure that I think all readers need to hear before moving on, so here's the excerpt from the HardOCP article regarding that disclosure:
Before we go any further, in the effort to be as transparent as possible, we need to let you know that AMD came to us and presented us with "this story." AMD shopped this story with other websites as well. However, with the information that was presented to us by AMD, there was no story to be told, but it surely pointed to one that was worth looking into. There needed to be some legwork done in collecting facts and interviews.
It appears
