NVIDIA's tight-lipped approach to insurance wins no battles

NVIDIA refuses to share vital insurance details, expects unquestioned payout.

A document has come to light that details the lengths to which Nvidia has gone to cover up the problems it has been having with its graphics chips.

The most recent lawsuit against it by the National Union Fire Insurance Company (NUFI) claims the company has withheld information on the nature of its bad bumps. The very same information it has withheld from us or any other nosy hack or awkward analysts.

The story was broken by a certain Mike Magee at TG Daily on Friday, and it has a lot of juicy bits. The short story is that the list of defective chips shipped by Nvidia goes back to the NV4x generation, and the list of OEMs affected counts ten and basically includes every Nvidia customer.

NUFI complains bitterly that Nvidia has been covering up essential information it is entitled to receive as Nvidia's insurer by refusing to disclose even the most basic facts about the company's GPU chip failures.

We had the same complaint. Let's go back over what happened so you can see the depths of this debacle.

On July 2, 2008, Nvidia issued an 8-K report that essentially said: "We have a big problem." But then it got really vague. Its 8-K mentioned devices "in certain versions of our previous generation MCP and GPU products used in notebook systems." Nvidia also claimed that it didn't know why the problems were happening, saying, "We have not been able to determine a root cause for these failures." But was sure that it had fixed them. No, really, it said so quite explicitly. "All newly manufactured products and all products currently shipping in volume have a different and more robust material set," it stated.

We said at the time that this was cobblers. Nvidia was blaming everyone but itself. Nvidia was not saying which OEMs were affected, and privately it was telling financial analysts that there was only one OEM, HP, that had problems. We said then that it was a design problem and unlike Nvidia's crack team (pun fully intended) of failure finders, we told you precisely what it was, that is, high lead "bad" bumps cracking between the die and the substrate.

We also told you that there was more than one OEM was affected; starting with Dell, then HP, then Apple, and lastly Toshiba. If you read the Apple link, we mentioned it, but it looks like Toshiba never got the guts to do right by its end-users. The ten OEMs listed by NUFI in its complaint are Dell, Toshiba, Apple, HP, Quanta, Wistron, Compal, Asus, Samsung, and Fujitsu-Siemens, "and others." That list adds up to at least ten times the number of affected OEMs that Nvidia had been originally spinning.

The claim all along from the company has been that it still doesn't know what is wrong, and it has no way of figuring anything out. That didn't prevent Nvidia from coming up with the dollar amount it would cost to fix the problem, with great precision, but it couldn't figure the problem out.

So now, the defective chip list has expanded to the G86, G86A2, G84, C51, G72, G72M, G73, G72A3, MCP67 and NV42 officially, but those are only the ones that are named in the lawsuit. There could be others that haven't cropped up yet, or that had problems that Nvidia managed to suppress early on.