14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that Nvidia is going deeper with the faulty chips issue. The entire picture of the problem has not been revealed yet, but the company already registers great losses due to the replacement of the M84/M86 cards. The Santa Clara company tries to blame others for the defective products, yet it seems that the costs have not been passed along, which would have solved the problem for the graphics cards manufacturer.
Initially, Nvidia announced that only HP had received cards that fail at "higher than expected rates". Later on, Dell also discovered problems with its notebooks, and things got aggravated. The replacement of the bad chips was supposed to cost Nvidia about $200 million, and, as the competition with AMD became more tight, the company marked a bad Q2 in revenues. Still, they claimed that only the mobile chips were manufactured using the "weak die/packaging material", and that the situation was under control.
Dell and HP issued BIOS solutions for the owners of notebooks that included Nvidia graphics cards from the mentioned series. Yet, these solutions were not meant to fix the problem, but only to postpone the moment of failing beyond the warranty period. HP also announced the extension of the warranty to the specified notebook models, and Dell might do the same as well. This would only mean that there will be more costs involved in the process, but the problem remains somehow unsolved.
To make things even worse, Apple MacBook Pro owners have also reported problems with their machines. While other components are running, the display goes blank and the machine won't boot up. It seems that some vendors have showed skepticism towards the integrity of the desktop graphics cards shipped by Nvidia. "Due to Nvidia not clearly explaining the details of the faults reported in its notebook GPUs, some channel vendors have demanded graphics card makers issue a recall for desktop-based discrete graphics cards using the same GPU core, according to sources at graphics card makers," is stated in a digitimes article.
The issue with the desktop cards seems to be a rather serious one. Four Nvidia partners are said to experience G92 and G94 chips failures in the field at high rates. The failures follow a bell curve, starting slow and going up very quickly, and Nvidia has yet another problem to deal with. The G92 chip is used in numerous cards, including 8800GT, 8800GTS, 8800GS, several mobile versions of 8800, most of the 9800 line, and a few 9600 flavors, while G94 is packed on the 9600GT. If all these cards are susceptible of failure, the costs will be dramatically increased for Nvidia.
The Inquirer reveals in an article that there are some people that talked directly about the G84, G86, G92 and G94 problems. Still, Nvidia is said to avoid commenting even on the obvious G84 and G86 issue, not to mention the newly discovered defective chips. According to the news site, behind all these problems lies a possible engineering failure, and the story is likely to get to the breaking point soon enough. Thus, Nvidia will suffer even greater losses and the problem could very well sink the company.