The majority of the discussions here are intellectual exercises anyway, it doesn't really matter if they're based on speculation, leaks or someone's random vision of reality. Look at the G80 discussions pre-launch, when the leaks happened, and notice how far from reality some of us were
That's part of the fun, of course. As noted by someone in the other thread, no public information was leaked on G80 before early October. And I wouldn't be surprised if the guys who leaked that shit got owned badly, considering the information was signed... (some of the numbers were very slightly off, most likely on purpose!)
Leaks nowadays aren't so frequent in terms of new architectures. They're much more frequent in terms of simplistic numbers, and that's true for a ton of reasons I won't get into. For example, it was known for months that G70 was a NV4x derivative with 24 pipelines; I don't think it was reliably leaked that the first MUL became a MADD, though, iirc. And in certain cases, it's obviously the companies themselves regulating the leaks (although that's not true in the vast majority of cases, some are definitely very real... And can be about more than the company leaking the information! heh)
Anyway, I honestly think the amount of leaking in the GPU business is pretty low nowadays, and it isn't working in disfavor of either of the IHVs, so I really don't think there's a problem and I don't really see your point. I'm not experienced enough in Intel/AMD rumours to know if the leakage is more problematic there, though. I'd say that nowadays, it's often not the actual employees leaking stuff though, and rather partners. Or press, when it's nearer the launch. I'm sure you saw those early pics of the G80 with a chinese guy in the mirror. In case you didn't know, he was breaking NDA, and everyone who went at the press event knew who he was, including NVIDIA. Talk about not giving a fuck... meh. So yeah, unless you got some new revolutionary arguement you're going to present now (errr
), I'm not sure the problem (except once partners/press got the info) is that dramatic... The companies (at least NVIDIA/ATI) seem to be doing just fine at keeping the really sensitive information to themselves, and it's been a while since I saw anything (but the G80 specs in october) getting publicly leaked that they truly cared about. So, uhm, WTF?
Uttar