NVIDIA responds to failing GPU rumours

A while ago Charlie Demerjian published several posts at The Inquirer regarding NVIDIA's problem with failing notebook GPUs. First he claimed the problem was far larger than NVIDIA admitted and said it would cost them significantly more than $200 million and later he even wrote G92 and G94 desktop parts are failing too.

I did not post these rumours on DV Hardware as it's very clear that Demerjian has a personal vendetta against NVIDIA and I don't really put a lot of trust in what he writes. His articles regarding NVIDIA are almost always very biased and furthermore he's been wrong about many things in the past. Had he provided any proof I would have posted it on this site but so far the only sources he has given are "anonymous sources" and links to articles written by himself.

Anyway, after some new forum posts Mike from NV News decided to give NVIDIA a call and see what they have to say about The Inquirer's claims. You can read it over here. NVIDIA debunks some myths and there are also some extracts from NVIDIA's official communication and statements made by NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang during the second quarter financial results conference call on Tuesday, August 12.

Myth 1 - NVIDIA has denied responsibility for the failures and is blaming suppliers and partners.

In our announcements accept responsibility for the failures. We DO call out the material failure but we also acknowledge that our suppliers and notebook designs because this is true and we need to disclose this in our official statements to the SEC. We would not go on record with the SEC making such bold claims if they weren’t true. See our Form 8-K statement below.

Myth 2 – There is an “official story” that the problems were limited a batch of a few bad parts for HP.

We have never issued a statement like this. See our publics statements below.

Where is source for that?

Myth 3 – NVIDIA is forcing a fix on notebook makers

The idea that a supplier like NVIDIA can dictate a fix to the world’s largest PC makers is preposterous. The truth is the notebook makers determining their own course of action and we are supporting them.

Where is source for that?

Myth 4 – NVIDIA is trying to cuts our financial liability.

We put aside $200M to help partners solve this problem for consumers. As far as we know NVIDIA is the first and only chip maker to help fund the cost for repairs.

Myth 5 – This affects desktop chips, G92, G94, etc.

We have only seen this problem on notebooks. We just reiterated this during an official financial call. Once again we would not say this if it wasn’t true. Note we have not disclosed the specific GPUs but we have stated this impact previous generation GPUs and that current gen GPUs are not in production.

Fact

Charlie has an obvious bias against NVIDIA and he has no sources to back up his claims. Out of all of the hundreds upon hundreds of notebooks models designed with NVIDIA chips in the last few years, only a small number of these have experienced the problem. Within this small number of models, only a small percentage actually experience the chip failure. It is highly unlike a notebook user will experience the problem. And we have never seen this problem on desktop.