Nvidia: Significant failure of laptop GPUs

[CoffeeShark]

Nvidia stocks dropped 24% when they admitted that they are experiencing "significant quantities" of problems in laptop GPUs.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nvidia

The products have been failing in the field at "higher than normal rates," Nvidia said.

Their solution? Run the fan more often via software. Oh, and don't bother checking your system, they haven't said which GPUs are affected, just "older" ones.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nvidia

Nvidia hasn't determined the exact cause of the problem...

PCWorld/Yahoo

[VincentVega]

Very interesting, Shark. I expect to see Intel do a Randy Savage Body slam on nVidia, and frankly I can't wait. nVidia's gotten so smug lately.. and here's yet another argument for Karma

[FuzzyLogik]

Interesting - seems like they have been getting a little smug, but will this be a big setback for them over all? I mean, a 24% drop is a doozie, but is it like the problems that AMD has been having?

[Craig]

their stock took a huge nosedive too from this news. they lost 25% of their value overnight. not good.

[basso4735]

my nvidia go6800 in my dell 9300 has been a TANK. Absolute TANK.

[CoffeeShark]

Quote:

Originally Posted by basso4735

my nvidia go6800 in my dell 9300 has been a TANK. Absolute TANK.

good - that's exactly why Nvidia should say exactly which GPUs have been affected.

[VincentVega]

Heat is always a problem, if you look back even 5 years ago, same problem. I'd say more than anything, it's heat management that is the single driving factor against processor efficiency improvements. TDP of 60 to 120 watts has been the norm for 10 years. transistor shrinkage is nothing more than a way of reducing heat. My laptop gets hot as hell with integrated graphics!

Basso, I know you clean your stuff regularly, so you should be fine

[CoffeeShark]

Quote:

Originally Posted by VincentVega

Heat is always a problem, if you look back even 5 years ago, same problem. I'd say more than anything, it's heat management that is the single driving factor against processor efficiency improvements. TDP of 60 to 120 watts has been the norm for 10 years. transistor shrinkage is nothing more than a way of reducing heat. My laptop gets hot as hell with integrated graphics!

Basso, I know you clean your stuff regularly, so you should be fine

yeah, generally my hard drive generates more heat than the GPU area, prob due to lack of active cooling on the HD.

We demand so much power in our laptops, they're bound to have hat problems.

[Teck]

Quote:

Originally Posted by CoffeeShark

good - that's exactly why Nvidia should say exactly which GPUs have been affected.

They probably thought that the best way to save face at the time was to just not talk about it...

With this ~25% drop in stock value, its clear that they made the wrong move...

I believe that they should have noted which GPU's have been having high failure rates, the typical time to failure on the affected models, what they are doing to fix it, why it happened & what they are doing to ensure that it never happens again, lastly they should have considered sharing the 'normal' failure rate on mobile GPU's as well as the failure rate for the effected GPU's (is it maybe a 2% difference)...

[VincentVega]

Agreed. the nVidia management seem to be making incredibly bad PR choices lately, what from going on the offensive to slam Intel graphics, to saying CUDA will kill x86, to this... it's like a different company