How much is NVidia jeopardizing right now?

[Entropy]

Companies do not generally make "irrational" or "emotional" decisions. However, they do sometimes take strong punitive steps in order to protect norms which are important to them.

Take the example of Jobs canning ATI when they revealed the design of the Mac Cube (IIRC) ahead of time. As a one-time occurence, this leak was not a big deal, and presumably had no impact whatsoever on the success or (as it turned out) failure of the Cube, and so Jobs' reaction might look irrational or emotional. But the secrecy of Apple's upcoming product designs, and the ability to have their introduction tightly controlled (i.e. by surprise unveilings at MacWorld keynotes), is very important to Apple's overall strategy and brand image. Jobs' strong reaction against ATI has meant and probably will continue to mean that no partner will ever leak "top-secret" product info ahead of a MacWorld again. Thus the move can be seen as quite rational from a game-theoretic perspective. (Assuming that the norm being protected is important enough. Also it probably didn't hurt that, as Sabastian points out, Nvidia was becoming a much more attractive supplier from Apple's perspective.)

So the question is, how important is it to OEMs that 3dMark numbers be accurate and reliable? Obviously it's important enough for Dell and Gateway to join FM's beta program, which is an outlay not just of money to FM but more importantly of engineering resources to participate in the program. And it is often said that many OEMs consider 3dMark scores an important tool when deciding sourcing for video cards/chips.

I'd like to emphasize the above.
Dell, HPaq et al do no necessarily take kindly to being lied to by their component suppliers, regardless of the actual issue involved. If these players find out that one of their suppliers have seen to that some of their decision making material has in effect been falsified, that will matter the next time a deal is to be struck. To what extent? That kind of information is rarely/never public, and in fact may never become explicit as a seperate item anywhere at any time.

But to assume that this will not have repercussions is ridiculous - if Dell had found out that a screen supplier had gotten a contract and systematically sold CRTs to Dell claimed to do 1600x1200@85Hz, only to later be shown only to support 1280x1024@85Hz, don't you think this would be a liability the next time the parties met to strike a deal? Customer protests would add insult to injury, but misrepresenting the performance specs of your product is a bad thing. Particularly if Dell/HPaq/... realize that all similarly derived performance numbers are also suspect.

And they will. When it comes to putting the squeeze on a supplier, these guys aren't necessarily merciful.

Entropy