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Comment by asr | Hacker News Reader

This article says that Techspot has obtained the 9900 (without being bound by an NDA, as others are), and that Intel is releasing misleading results while other reviewers are bound by an NDA, but that Techspot is not going to show their own benchmarks--which could refute the misleading results Intel has authorized for public release--out of a sense of "professionalism."

Actually, any "professional" journalism outfit would show the public the newsworthy results, not withhold this information from readers because of a desire not to piss off industry contacts.

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The thing is you just need to piss off an industry contact once to be taken off of their list, essentially neutering themselves in the future and making them less competitive compared to other websites.

It's a sad state of affair, but that's the reality of it.

They were already neutered, they weren't given a part to review. the part they allegedly have was probably gotten through unofficial means, since it is highly unlikely intel would just give out parts to media outlets ahead of a launch without an NDA attached to it.

In the video he portrays the decision as out of respect for the sources under NDA, not out of respect for Intel

Not sure I fully get it though, a scoop is a scoop

The point of a review embargo is to prevent things from collapsing into a race to be first with the scoop, by encouraging/forcing everyone to take a reasonable amount of time to prepare their review. Cooperating with review embargoes is usually the best way to promote honest and fair coverage, which is what most professional tech journalists really want.

NDAs that try to restrict the content of a review and not just the publication date are reprehensible, but that doesn't seem to be what's going on here. Intel's just trying to soften the ground with their own misleading numbers, but still permitting the trustworthy sources to do their usual thing.

That isn't always the point of a review embargo. Take a game with heavy marketing that the corp realizes is going to get bad reviews. Sometimes they will delay reviews of things like that as long as possible, until day before or day of release.

The computer hardware market is pretty different from the video game market. Video games tend to be much more reliant on pre-orders and the first few weeks of sales, while computer hardware is subject to seasonal fluctuations but otherwise maintains strong ongoing sales throughout the product cycle. Games are also much less amenable to objective comparative analysis.

In the computer hardware world, a review embargo that coincides with the product hitting the shelves does not carry any negative connotations about expectations for the product's reception.

Anyone who pre-orders a video game is buying for some speial sense of status, not product quality.

I'm not a big gamer, but aren't they often cheaper if you pre-order?

Notably, the video game industry pioneered the conditional embargo - where you can publish a review freely as long as it's above a certain score. There's pretty much no explanation for this other than "we want to lie to customers", and there's pretty much no definition of journalistic integrity that would permit signing it, but it happens nevertheless.

(Which, interestingly, means some sites that don't issue numeric scores are barred-by-default from those games. I think that's sometimes been used to spot these embargoes?)

Intel is violating the embargo in order to give primay to their false narrative. That's odious.

What's the use in releasing the 9900k results? The thesis of the article is that Principled Technologies biased the results, and they've shown that with the ryzen vs 8700k results.

Reposting (without the inflammatory 'did you even watch the video' comment) at the request of asr:

the video doesn't dispute the benchmarks of the 9900, but rather they dispute the published compared benchmarks of the ryzen 7 2700X, which used default, unconfigured memory settings to push the benchmark down, while the 9900 benchmarks used configured memory settings (as it should)

It is most from a respect to your pears that will respect the NDA, if you release early then the others lose the views and they can't respond until the embargo is over.

But they give results for the fairly similar last generation processor, with similar behaviour. "Pissing off industry contacts" isn't needed.

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