Lawsuit Claims Nvidia Execs Concealed Serious Flaw 219
snydeq writes "A lawsuit filed in a California court on Tuesday alleges Nvidia concealed the existence of a serious defect in its graphics-chip line for at least eight months 'in a series of false and misleading statements made to the investing public.' The lawsuit contends that Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and CFO Marvin Burkett knew as early as November 2007 about a flaw that exists in the packaging used with some of the company's graphics chips that caused them to fail at unusually high rates. Nvidia publicly acknowledged the flaw on July 2, when it announced plans to take a one-time charge of up to $200 million to cover warranty costs related to the problem. That announcement caused Nvidia's stock price to fall by 31 percent to $12.98 and reduced the company's market capitalization by $3 billion, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit seeks class-action status against Nvidia and unspecified damages."
Re:Good, about time (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Again? (Score:5, Informative)
You must be new, I've said that quite a few times.
Seriously, though, they're more stable now, and they get fairly frequent updates.
Re:Curious to see where this one goes... (Score:5, Informative)
Past the joke, if it makes it past the warranty period you have little regress as a customer. While it's illegal to say "we're doing great" while knowing your main product line is failing from a security law point of view, unless the failing parts are in a safety critical application (e. g. child car seats) there is no law mandating a recall/replacement/settlement for selling a crappy product.
Re:Nvidia customer here (Score:5, Informative)
No one knows for sure, and Nvidia isn't telling. The Inquirer says practically [theinquirer.net] all [theinquirer.net] of them, but their author has a history with Nvidia so there's quite a potential for bias there. The running theory is that the problem is due to thermal properties of a substrate material. This substrate material supposedly expands and contracts at a different rate than surrounding material in the chip package. Over time, this stresses the silicon or solder points, eventually causing a failure of the part. Laptop parts are definitely affected, you only need to look in notebook manufacturers forums and you'll see an incredible number of posts from owner of notebooks with, for example, 8600 GT mobile parts.
Desktop parts may also be affected, since they're all based on the same core silicon with (supposedly) the same substrate materials. It's possible that the problems aren't as apparent (at least not yet) due to the different thermal conditions you'd see in a tower chassis compared to a notebook. The very popular 8800GTs out there may start failing en masse in three months, six months, a year's time, or maybe never. Because Nvidia won't specifically say which parts are affected, whether it's all the parts or only certain manufacturing runs, etc., we have only speculation and rumor to go on.
Re:Seriously, what is the issue with Nvidia chips? (Score:3, Informative)
In short, it's the connection of the chip to the board. You have minute metal connections providing current and data transport from the physical chip to the rest of the computer. The choice of material for these connection was poor, and so was the choice of glue holding the chip and the substrate together (and ideally protecting the metal connects from undue stress).
The main indicator for a serious flaw was the drastic changes NVIDIA made to their chip mounting design after the flaw was admitted - it was the kind of changes you normally don't do in the middle of a production run, and if you only do them after very careful testing.
Re:Curious to see where this one goes... (Score:4, Informative)
The laptop is 3 months out of warranty so it's going to cost me around $1200 to get it fixed,
Apple has a flat-fee repair of like $300, fyi. Take it to a Genius Bar.
Well, not really (Score:5, Informative)
1. A dirty little secret of all governments, the USA included, is that they _can't_ get rid of unemployment or inflation, and they're actually trying to keep both where they want them. There's this funny little hyperbolic-looking curve called the Phillips Curve [wikipedia.org], which ties inflation to unemployment. If you even tried to push one to zero, the other rises sky-high.
So the best any government can do is to keep both at a point they can live with. Exactly what that point is, that's a matter of political debate and position, but everyone tries to do that. A mean most used is the interest rate. That's what the federal reserve does in the USA, but other countries have their own similar institutions.
(The corolary being that any politician which harps on unemployment and inflation as proof that his opponents are evil, or worse yet, promises to really solve either or both, is himself a liar and has no scruples telling you lies to gain power.)
So, yes, a bunch of people without jobs _are_ what makes the economy work. (A capitalist economy included.) Because without those, you'd get a hyperinflation comparable to interwar Germany. (Just as a comparison point, not saying that that's the same cause.) And conversely, if anyone actually managed to eliminate inflation, like some idiots demand, most of you would be out of job.
2. Well, actually, the reluctance to make people change jobs was arguably one of the (several) reasons the Soviet economy colapsed. They were very reluctant to kick people out of a job, since the whole theory was that everyone should be given a job in communism. So if they made a hammer manufacturing company, and 20 years later there would be more of a need for wrenches, they'd still keep a bunch of people there making hammers, just so they don't kick them out and tell them to find another job. It's not the only factor, of course, but worth thinking about.
Or seen at another level, they wanted to eliminate both the unemployment _and_ inflation (via price controls) which had the same devastating results as when it had been attempted before. If both can't take their natural positions on that curve, something else has to give. In their case, productivity went down instead, and corruption went out of hand. Which effectively is another way to get inflation, only in a much more destructive way.
3. The whole thing about capitalism and the free market is that it's an optimization algorithm. It's really a genetic algorithm, based on semi-uninformed trial and error. The "genes" (processes, ideas, products) which are closer to optimal survive and are copied by others, and the process repeats, moving it all closer to the optimum. The genes which lost, and the companies which bet on them, die. Sometimes spectacularly, leaving a bunch of people temporarily unemployed.
That's how it's supposed to work. Bit wasteful, no doubt, and stressful for those who end up looking for a new job. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame (who, I might add, is actually trained as an economist, so he might understand these things) claimed in a blog post that it's "harnessing the power of stupidity" and that at any given moment, 80% of society's resources are pushed off a cliff by idiots. But somehow it seems to work better than anything else we've tried. Trying to prevent that optimization cycle from happening, deviates from optimum very quickly, and produces even worse results.
It _is_ what makes capitalism work.
Re:Curious to see where this one goes... (Score:5, Informative)
$1200?
There is your price of "portability".
As a former mechanic, it always pissed me off when auto manufacturers tried to force customers to dealerships for repairs by making the components so difficult to repair that even independent mechanics could not fix them.
The dirty sekret is that the dealerships couldn't either. They simply resorted to part-swapping to confirm their half-assed diagnosis(manufacturer flow charts(Step 14: Replace with known good part), NOT actual testing).
The end result was that the independents were made to look like bumbling idiots("Your gunna have to take it to the Dealer...") after actually trying to find the problem, while the Dealership makes the money just by throwing parts at the problem (at customer expense).
I HIGHLY suspect that your a victim of that same process. One good reason to AUTOMATICALLY suspect your bill when there is more then one component replaced. If there was, more then likely, the first part didn't fix it, but the second did, and they want to get paid for the time it took to install the first part, so they simply tell you one part "took out" the other.
This is one of the reasons I am a FORMER mechanic. From a moral standpoint, I simply could not be a party to the deception that is all too prevalent in the business, and quit.
Re:Are Class Action Damages Warranted? (Score:3, Informative)
The class is stockholders not consumers. Unless you hold/held stock in Nvidia in the timerange, you won't see anything.
Re:Curious to see where this one goes... (Score:3, Informative)
I had a Cisco 400 with a lifetime warranty. It died a while back. It was out of warranty. Apparently Lifetime for Cisco means 5 years.
I hope my 8600M GT doesn't have to deal with it. It's in my MacBook Pro, so no easy card swap.
Re:Curious to see where this one goes... (Score:5, Informative)
I had one from PNY. I called to have them make good on the lifetime warranty, and was told that "lifetime" meant the lifetime of that product line, and since they no longer make that card, it's no longer covered. I went back and read the fine print, and sure enough, that's exactly what the warranty said.
I hope they enjoy whatever profits they made off of me on the sale of that one card, because I am now an ex-PNY-customer. I now typically buy EVGA.
You can't trust public corporations. (Score:3, Informative)
You can trust individuals, yes, but regardless of the pernicious doctrine of corporate personhood, that's as far as you should go. Corporations are basically required by law to behave in an untrustworthy way, and even if the individual at the helm of the corporation is trustworthy there are limits to how far they can carry their intentions (however good) through.
Re:Curious to see where this one goes... (Score:5, Informative)
I asked the "Genius" about the flat fee thing and he said it didnt exist. Which surprised me because a year and a half ago I had a different Macbook Pro die and the flat fee applied in this case..
So apparently it either
a) Doesnt exist anymore
b) There are obscure rules for when and where it applies
c) Some "Genius's" are douchebags