Self-inflicted AMD PR Drama [Nano Fury Edition]

If giving early access hardware review to a site may not be mutually beneficial, why should AMD even bother?
Maybe I am naive, if AMD's PR department decides that certain reviewers will portray their new product in a negative light, it would make sense for AMD to skip them.
They can spend the money to evaluate the product a la consumer reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports
 
Well it creates bad press anyways, and these review sites will get their hands on the card eventually, so it doesn't matter. Not to mention journalists are a pretty tight nit group, so its not like they don't talk to each other. It might cause more problems than it possibly will solve. Its one thing not to say anything, but its another thing to give excuses and being called out for it, then tell the real reason, it makes them look foolish, childish, and we can probably add many more adjectives to that.

Ever here the saying, once said it can't taken back, or a person opens their mouth they will leave no doubt.
 
Razor1 said:
Well it creates bad press anyways, and these review sites will get their hands on the card eventually, so it doesn't matter. Not to mention journalists are a pretty tight nit group, so its not like they don't talk to each other. It might cause more problems than it possibly will solve.
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So AMD must be held hostage to the press? Maybe a possible solution is for these journalists to help each other out rather than complain about a tweet.
 
Well AMD just apologized to them, its not being held hostage, when a company points out certian sites and says they are biased without really giving justification of that not to mention saying they don't have enough cards at first, they were trying to avoid the confrontation at first then they went over the top with it, then they have to apologize, its not good PR. It shows inability and unprofessional from AMD's part.

A better way of handling it would have been we aren't giving out cards to every reviewer because allocation is tight, and left it at that. Giving away cards to fans, all they would have had to say it was already allocated for that. No need to get into all this bias , fair review crap. By doing so they created more problems for themselves, specifically the PR department, whats ironic is PR is the one that started it all in the first place. A good PR team would never have went down that road, they would have known the outcome before they said it.
 
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Unprofessional would be if a journalist used the next review to "come back" at the company. If then, it would just prove AMD's point and drive said journalist to irrelevancy.

Scott Wasson response was really level-headed, Kyle was a blind rant of someone that admits deleting posts out of spite.
 
I sort of enjoyed Kyle's little editorial actually. Roy Taylor hasn't been doing AMD any good as far as I can tell. Kyle has been energetically calling out bullshit for many years now. :)
 
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Update 10:02 PM 9/9/25: I just received a very nice phone call from AMD's Roy Taylor. He apologized for his earlier comments on Twitter and says he doesn't think The Tech Report's reviews are unfair. He seems like a decent guy with perhaps a too-strong personality, and I can relate to that. So all is forgiven from my point of view.

Thanks to everybody for their support. Here's hoping we can put this bit of unpleasantness behind us and move on to happier things.
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http://techreport.com/news/29011/updated-amd-vp-explains-nano-exclusion-apologizes

At first I didn't really interpret Taylor's tweet as meaning that TR was unfair, just that there would be enough Nanos sent to reviewers to have a sufficient number of fair reviews. The comment about TPU, however, was much less ambiguous and I'd like to know just what Taylor is unhappy about.
 
monstercameron said:
So AMD must be held hostage to the press?
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The same press that AMD is quite happy to throw cards and processors at when the review metrics (performance-per-$ for example) suit them?
monstercameron said:
If giving early access hardware review to a site may not be mutually beneficial, why should AMD even bother?
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Can you imagine the uproar if the roles were reversed and the sites selectively chose what AMD launches they were going to review?
firstminion said:
Roy Taylor was responsible for similar moves from nvidia, and it worked for them.
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To a degree, but I think the gloss wore off once Roy started going off script. He was demoted from the gaming program to liaison with phone companies fairly soon after his public tirades, such as " no one except Brits care about ATI and AMD", and Nvidia very publicly distanced themselves from Roy's comments about Intel and AMD's processor development being the proverbial Dodo. Given that Roy has already been demoted from AMD's global channel sales post already, I'm wondering what his new position might entail.

Judging by the comments - both for and against Roy, it is quite sad to see how much his pronouncements are vilified or condoned depending upon who signs his paycheck.
 
I'm really enjoying all of this.



- The whining and crying from some websites and the inability to keep composure exposes the pros from the brats.
- The belief some of they have to be some sort of authority.
- And lets not fool ourselves, there will be self entitled butt hurts along the way, but this is all about money flow.




Everyone should live "up" to their financial limitations, not above. Websites grow and shrink. When they shrink, some downsize and others switch their motto from "professionalism" to "capitalism".



At the end every website will be OK, specially the whining ones, because stuff like this feeds more clicks than actual reviews. They know it. To quote Omar Little from - The wire: "its aaall part of the game".
 
I ask me something, is not all thoses sites are the one who have follow the Nvidia email to dont show the Ashes singularity benchmark ?

I joke but well, this could be an indication.
 
I think it would be fair if Scott posted the conversation with Roy so I can make it my ringtone.
 
@dskneo
I don't get your point. Whining and crying, who exactly is "whining and crying", in your opinion? "The butthurt"? Your entire stance is incredibly nebulous and iffy - if anything, you come off as a bizarre AMD PR apologist, but it's hard to tell anything about what you really mean with that bizarre post of yours, other than that it seems entirely misinformed and just plain odd.
 
Grall said:
@dskneo
I don't get your point. Whining and crying, who exactly is "whining and crying", in your opinion? "The butthurt"? Your entire stance is incredibly nebulous and iffy - if anything, you come off as a bizarre AMD PR apologist, but it's hard to tell anything about what you really mean with that bizarre post of yours, other than that it seems entirely misinformed and just plain odd.
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Hello Grall
My previous post was perfectly clear I'm afraid. I respect your observation but I can't see where you saw the "AMD PR apologist" as I didn't single them out. You could infer "AMD" because its the entity behind this situation, but I'm talking about review websites VS big industry players in general.



Anyway, there is nothing nebulous or bizarre about popular review websites outgrowing themselves to think they are "invaluable" or "important" for the industry. Some people are ego driven, such a thing is bound to happen.


What is nebulous and bizarre is how rarely a situation occurs which exposes which website strayed from their responsibility on account of their egos or other motives. Here enters hardocp, for example. Today it became clear as day how self-inflated that particular website became.

On the other hand, some other sidelined websites handled it like professionals still trying to make a living.
 
Except the issue is not at all how the websites reacted, dskneo.


The reviewers (some of them, at least) were treated injustely and yet according to you they are to blame because they didn't react according to your arbitrary expectation.
 
entity279 said:
Except the issue is not at all how the websites reacted, dskneo.


The reviewers (some of them, at least) were treated injustely and yet according to you they are to blame because they didn't react according to your arbitrary expectation.
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I wouldn't call exclusion unjust, if this is how they react whenever something doesn't go their way then there are some serious issues they must solve.
 

@ entity279
That is a fair point of view, yes. Its according to my perception of what review website should be (to a consumer).

But I wont make an issue of how a Hardware company chooses to sell their product, because I vote with my money.
Hardware companies exist to sell products. Reviews websites do not. Companies will mislead, sometimes lie, distort charts and use dubious logic. Its the expected behaviour and they should be called out on it. But not when its their choice to decide who to give samples to.

Now that the smoke has passed (nano reviews), you cannot help to see how unfair websites were to AMD (based on conjecture from AMD nano performance chart criteria) and not the other way around. We leave this comical situation knowing which sites are more trustful.


monstercameron said:
I wouldn't call exclusion unjust, if this is how they react whenever something doesn't go their way then there are some serious issues they must solve.
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exactly my thoughts
 
dskneo said:
Now that the smoke has passed (nano reviews), you cannot help to see how unfair websites were to AMD (based on conjecture from AMD nano performance chart criteria) and not the other way around. We leave this comical situation knowing which sites are more trustful.
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Yeah the sites who didn't just grin and bear it when the mouthy VP Twitter clown slandered their hard work.
 
dskneo said:
My previous post was perfectly clear I'm afraid. I respect your observation but I can't see where you saw the "AMD PR apologist" as I didn't single them out.
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No, it wasn't clear; you mentioned no specifics, but rather seemed to paint everyone who reacted to AMDs (frankly provocative) behavior as self-important, 'butthurt whiners and cryers'. That's bizarre, and also undeserved.

AMD apologist, because you served up an ad hominem rather than discuss the actual issue at hand - which incidentally happened to be that AMD fucked up - again.
 
dskneo said:
Hardware companies exist to sell products. Reviews websites do not.
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Review sites exist to sell clicks. Clicks = money, reviews = clicks, product samples = reviews. Therefore product samples = money.

Companies will mislead, sometimes lie, distort charts and use dubious logic. Its the expected behaviour and they should be called out on it. But not when its their choice to decide who to give samples to.
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If it was money rather than products they were giving/not giving to the review sites, would you be so sanguine?
 
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