nVidia takes $119.1 million charge for bad chips
The industry leading graphics chip maker has said repeatedly that materials and manufacturing issues in its products have been solved. Yet, the company has again told shareholders they’ve spent another huge sum to rectify this non-existent problem, bringing their two year total for product replacement and repair to well over $300 million.
NVidia has announced (HPC Wire) that the company posted a net loss of $105.3 million largely on the back of a net charge of $119.1 million “related to the weak die/packaging set used in certain previous generation” products.
“NVidia’s business is recovering. Product demand is improving, and our strategic investments are leading to new growth,” said Jen-Hsun “open a can of whoop ass” Huang, president and CEO. “Our two newest businesses began to ship meaningful amounts of product this past quarter and show significant promise.”
In 2008, nVidia booked a nearly $200 million charge to cover fundamentally the same problem in previous generation products. To date, at least three MacBook Pro revisions have been affected by this issue and it’s not entirely clear whether or not current generation Apple pro portables come to market without bad bumps.
This issue aside, a strong relationship
Though quickly quashed, recent months have seen rumors of a rift between Apple and nVidia over the issue of defective chips.
Over roughly the same time frame, however, Apple and nVidia have delivered native H.264 acceleration across a Mac product line that’s gone almost 100 percent nVidia over the last year. Further, the two companies have worked closely in establishing OpenCL, a new marquis feature in Snow Leopard and industry standard that provides a methods for making use of unused graphical processing unit clock cycles, a technology that’s expected to fundamentally alter the computing landscape.
It’s pretty obvious that Apple and nVidia have a close working relationship. Still, that this bad chip issue keeps resurfacing has to be a bone of contention.
Then again, AMD/ATI isn’t exactly keeping the heat on, which really highlights the sad state of competition in the graphics chip business rather than the fundamental competence of either company.
Here’s hoping Intel finally puts an integrated solution worthy of the name…
What’s your take?
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