[ltp] Massive nVidia GPU failure rate in the field, but no recall

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Fri, 01 Aug 2008, Chris Penn wrote:
> What is more important
> Nvidia takes charge for bad chips?
> or
> Who is to blame?

Who cares about blame?  It clearly lies either in nVidia or the packager
(the chip fab has nothing to do with it, unless it is also the packager) and
in both cases it will matter not one yota to whomever bought the laptop with
the defective chip inside.

What is important to me is that: HP, Dell and Lenovo have the bad chips on
their products, and I want to know what they will do about the issue for the
people who bought their laptops.

So, what I will pay attention to is how each vendor will deal with the
issue, how clean and upfront they will be about it, and what will they do
for their customers.

Also, since it is a the root of the problem, I will also pay attention on
how much help or a hindrance nVidia is going to be on the whole process of
getting non-defective GPUs to those who got one of the duds.  So far, they
are NOT helping any: We don't even know if there are new, not defective
batches of the GPUs.  If there are, we do not know what are their markings,
to make sure we don't get broken ones in any replacements we get from
vendors.

> The truth is, Nvidia has supported the Linux community more then most
> when it comes to hardware in the last few year.  When i buy a laptop
[...]

Well, I don't agree, but I am not up to wasting my time talking about it
either.

> There are a lot of issues with Nvidia not bringing their drivers open
> source.  I wish they would do this, but as a community, we can only
> keep asking.

No, you can do a lot more.  As an *easy* example, that depends not on nVidia
and peer pressure at all, have you helped the reverse engineering efforts
lately?  If you did, then why cower up behind the "we can only keep asking"
wall?

Me? I find that Intel and ATI hardware is, right now, a much better choice.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh