NVISION 08 - Jen-Hsun Talks Larrabee, Mobility, VIA and More

Jen-Hsun Talks about "Bad Chips"

You may have heard that NVIDIA has had some issues with higher than expected GPU failure rates in notebooks. The parts that seem to be impacted are G84/G86 based GPUs and the failure appears to be something related to the physical manufacturing of the GPU itself.

A reporter from The Inquirer asked Jen-Hsun to clarify what other GPUs might be affected by the manufacturing issue and to basically get more specific, publicly with what users can expect.

Jen-Hsun said that he was the first to admit that this problem existed, having set aside $200M to deal with any potential repairs that had to be made. He characterized the issue as follows:

"We know that there are some failures that are associated with our chips. We know that its related to specific combinations of the chip, the deisgn of the notebook...depending on the design of the thermal solution...and all of the software that goes on top of it...sometimes it will fail. Most of the notebooks are fine...certain notebooks have this problem."

There isn't an official recall, but if your notebook fails and it's got a GPU in it that NVIDIA agrees may be problematic, your OEM should repair it for you.

The question Jen-Hsun didn't answer is what GPUs in specific that this problem impacts and whether or not it extends to the entire line of G8x GPUs, desktop and mobile.

Jen-Hsun did mention that the problem is very specific and can crop up over a long period of time. While NVIDIA's competitors are aware of what caused the problem, none of them appear to be impacted by it (even those that manufacture at the same facilities as NVIDIA), it just seems to be something that is exclusive to NVIDIA.

Who is to blame? According to Jen-Hsun both NVIDIA and its OEM partners are to blame for the issue, although he would not go as far as to blame TSMC, its manufacturing partner.

What about Lucid?

What does NVIDIA think about Lucid and Hydra? Well, some good things and some bad things. Of course no one I asked gave me anywhere near an answer about how they thought SLI would be impacted if Lucid met their goals. And there's really no good way to dodge that either; it always ends in sort of a trailing off into other things attempt to change the subject.

Some people were a little more willing to talk about the technology itself, even if they didn't go near how it would impact their platform position.

Jen-Hsun flat out said he thought that it is naive of Lucid to believe that their solution can divide the work load effectively and in a way where they get linear scaling and only the API is taken into account (the application doesn't matter). He believes that you must tune for specific applications and that high compatibility is difficult, let alone multi-GPU scaling.

David Kirk had a similar take on things but went into a little more depth. His issue is that even if you can split up the workload, there are going to be resources every GPU that's working on a scene will need in order to render it properly. Things rendered to textures, cube maps, and other "funny buffer games" make it so that rendering isn't separable. There are just some things that need to happen on all GPUs and this will make it so that performance doesn't scale linearly.

Which makes sense. But the Lucid guys still keep saying they can get linear scaling regardless of the game on any platform that uses their hardware. Which sounds nice even if it sounds a little far fetched. They did show off two games at IDF, but we would really like to see more and to have the opportunity to test it's epic scaling claims.

It's tough to tell whether NVIDIA is just being cocky and writing off a company that they don't think can pull something off, of if the logical stuff that NVIDIA is saying is really rock solid enough that they don't have to worry. Time will tell of course.

Personally, I like to dream big. But it is easy to be skeptical about Lucid because their claims are so dramatic. Like they say about anything that sounds too good to be true ... But really, I still want someone to tell me what happens to SLI and the NVIDIA chipset business if Lucid's product really delivers on its promises.

Final Words

So far we haven't been too impressed with NVISION, but access to folks like Jen-Hsun and David Kirk has thus far been worth it.

We're off to hear Epic's Tim Sweeney speak about Unreal Engine 3, check back later for more updates from NVISION.