NVIDIA Pays Out Even More, Scales back NVISION

Rob Williams

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Things might be a little (hah!) heated between AMD and Intel, but NVIDIA hasn't been able to stay out of the news for all the wrong reasons either. It's been no secret that NVIDIA has had troubles with mobile graphics chips, and the fix for those seem to be coming to an end, at least the company's pocketbook could hope so. During its 2009 fiscal year, NVIDIA paid out $43.6 million to cover these faulty chips, which included the chips themselves and also the labor to have them replaced.

This is in addition to last year's $196 million paid out for the same purpose, bringing the total to $239.6 million for this issue. Ouch. Even for a massive company like NVIDIA, that kind of loss doesn't go unnoticed. In an unrelated note, NVIDIA has also announced that it will not be holding an NVISION conference this year, thanks to, wait for it... the state of the economy.

I'm sure that's fine for many people though, since money seems to be tighter than ever, and it's hard to want to spend a fair amount of money on travel unless it's for vacation. The company will instead host smaller, more targeted events, and we can assume those are not for the public, and would likely be of no interest to the public. NVIDIA expressed great interest last year to hold another NVISION, so we may very well see one next year if the economy gets back into tip-top (or at least close) shape (and if the company itself can pick its revenue).

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As early as 2007, Hewlett-Packard listed laptop models affected by the graphics chip glitch. In August of 2008, Dell also listed affected models. And Apple said in October that it would repair faulty graphics chips. There have also been recent reports of Nvidia graphics chip issues with Apple's new MacBooks, though Apple, to date, has not confirmed that these alleged issues exist.


Source: Nanotech: The Circuits Blog
 
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