According to whispers in the industry, NVIDIA’s much-dreaded GeForce Partner Program is reportedly making a return in the mobile (notebook) segment, only in China though. The company is supposedly forcing OEMs and ODMs to limit their designs to NVIDIA GPUs and ignore the newly launched Radeon RX 6000M lineup.
Sum it up: NVIDIA doing GPP again in China, hijacking OEMs so making RDNA2 laptop designs will lose rebates and supply, resulting them making much less money. OEMs are forced to kneel down before NVIDIA. Basically anti-competitive but you can't sue them because region specific. pic.twitter.com/PSVOZis4oh
This is a fairly commonly used tactic in certain regions with limited anti-competitive rules wherein CPU/GPU vendors sign up with an OEM, granting rebates and increased supply priority in turn for exclusivity deals and/or ignoring rival offerings. This is likely one of the reasons why we didn’t see Renoir laptops with high-end GeForce Turing GPUs. Generally, though, these kinds of deals are usually localized to one or two vendors and OEMs.
In the case of the Ampere mobile vs RDNA 2 notebook designs, however, NVIDIA is reportedly forcing multiple OEMs to limit their offerings to the former, preventing AMD from penetrating the already one-sided mobile GPU market. This is a shame as the Radeon RX 6000M GPUs seem to be highly competitive products, and as always, more competition is ultimately better for the end consumer.
Note: At the time of writing, we haven’t been able to confirm which partners are being coerced into this exclusivity sort of deal. We’ll update the story when we learn more.
Computer hardware enthusiast, PC gamer, and almost an engineer. Former co-founder of Techquila (2017-2019), a fairly successful tech outlet. Been working on Hardware Times since 2019, an outlet dedicated to computer hardware and its applications.
