THE BURNING QUESTION on everyone'smind is what Nvidia parts are failing in the field? No GT200 jokes here, NVpersonnel are still quite sensitive about that, but our moles have told usabout the bum GPUs.
The short story is that all the G84 and G86 parts are bad. Period. Noexceptions. All of them, mobile and desktop, use the exact same ASIC, so expectthem to go south in inordinate numbers as well. There are caveats however, andwe will detail those in a bit.
Both of these ASICs have a rather terminal problem with unnamed substrateor bumping material, and it is heat related. If you ask Nvidia officially, youwill get no reason why this happened, and no list of parts affected, we tried.Unofficially, they will blameeveryone under the sun, and trash their suppliers in very colourfullanguage.
The press is totally stonewalled, but analysts are quite another story. Ifyou call up with Wall Street credentials, they will tell you what is going on,but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be entirely accurate. What analysts tellme they were officially told is that it is a specific batch of parts that onlyHP got.
The official story is that it was a batch of end-of-life parts that used adifferent bonding/substrate process for only that batch. Once again, the trustyINQUIRER bullshit detectors went off so loudly that the phone almost vibratedout of my hand. More than enough people tell us both the G84 and G86 use thesame ASIC across the board, and no changes were made during their lives.
When the process engineers pinged by the INQ picked themselves off thefloor from laughing, they politely said that there is about zero chance that NVwould change the assembly process or material set for a batch, much less an EOLpart.
On the less technical side, multiple analysts also told us that NVspecifically told them that this problem is confined only to HP. I wonder whyDell is having failures in huge numbers for their XPS lines and replacing themwith ATI parts? Why is Asus having similar problems? Go check the messageboards, any notebooks that came with G84s and G86s have boards filled with deadmachine problems. Most of these, especially on the NV forums are being quashedand removed by admins, so act quickly and take screenshots of your posts.
Basically, NV seems to have told each analyst a highly personalisedversion of the story, and stonewalls everyone else who asks. Why? The magnitudeof the problem is huge. If Dell and HP hold their feet to the fire, anyone wantto bet that $200 million won't cover it? This has all the hallmarks of thingsthe SEC used to investigate in a time before government was purchasable.
The other problem is the long tail. Failures occur due to heat cycling,cold -> hot -> cold for the non-engineers out there. If you remember, wesaid all G84s and G86s are affected, and all are the same ASIC, so why aren'tthe desktop parts dying? They are, you are just low enough on the bell curvethat you don't see it in number that set off alarm bells publicly yet.
Laptops get turned on and off many times in a day, and due to the powermanagement, throttle down much more than desktops. This has them going throughthe heat cycle multiple times in a day, whereas desktops typically get turnedon and off once a day, sometimes left on for weeks at a time. Failures likethis are typically on a bell curve, so they start out slow, build up, then tailoff.
Since laptops and desktops have a different "customer use patterns",they are at different points on the bell curve. Laptops have got to the,"we can't bury this anymore" point, desktops haven't, but they will -guaranteed. The biggest question is whether or not they will be under warrantyat that point, not whether or not they are defective. They are.
If you look at the HPpage, the prophylactic fix they offer is to more or less run the fan allthe time. Once again, for the non-engineers out there, fan running eats a lotof power, so this destroys the battery life of notebooks. Basically, peoplebought a machine with a battery life of X, and now it is Y to prevent meltdownfrom a bum part. It doesn't fix anything, it just makes the failures takelonger, hopefully past the warranty period, at a huge battery life cost. Fireup your class actions people, you got shafted.
Back to the engineering, we intoned that this was a cover-upof engineering failures by Nvidia. We also said that they probably knewwhat was happening. Think we were kidding? Readthis, twice, linked again herefor those that can't move their mouse to the left, it is that important.
If we knew a year and change ago that these exact parts had heat problems,think Nvidia did? Think the voltage difference between A02 and A03 iscoincidence? This is a classic example of not meeting engineering goals andoverclocking through brute force (voltage bump in engineering terms) tocompensate.
HP and the others were blindsided by this, it happened far too late in thedesign cycle to compensate, and it looks to have been covered up hastily,badly, and eventually fatally. Blaming suppliers, OEMs and users is completelyunfounded and says that NV is unwilling to properly address this issue, onlyhide from it. NV knew, they made silicon changes to fix another problem thatdirectly lead to this problem.
Nvidia is covering this up, hard. All the usual sources are keeping mum onthe topic with only a few daring to speak out. Given the sheer magnitude ofthis, their marketshare for notebooks was huge in the period, this could verywell suck up most of their remaining cash. Don't underestimate how bad this isgoing to be for NV, we highly doubt $200 million will even begin to cover it.
