NVISION 08 - Jen-Hsun Talks Larrabee, Mobility, VIA and More
by Anand Shimpi & Larry Barber on August 26, 2008 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
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.
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SoulSlave - Wednesday, August 27, 2008 - link
Well, they simply don't have to deliver linear performance increase. Anything above what SLI has to offer, at a reasonable price point would suffice, I mean, who would prefer to be straped to a single GPU manufacturer when you could have any combination of GPUs you want, delivering better performance?biostud - Wednesday, August 27, 2008 - link
The only problem for nvidia regarding Lucid Hydra is the loss of a need for a nvidia chipset.For both AMD/ATi and nVidia Lucid Hydra still needs two videocards, and since this is the core business for both companies it doesn't matter that much if it's going to replace Crossfire and SLI.
rjc - Tuesday, August 26, 2008 - link
As have an affected notebook, have been following the bad chips news stories, there is a reasonably informative article here:http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39045/135/">http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39045/135/
If above holds i cant imagine the relationship between nvidia and notebook oems will be very good over the next 12 months. Whichs a pity for them as the notebook market seems to be growing quite well despite everything. I guess this is the idea behind the smartphones move - different business though volumes higher and margins tighter than on high end graphic cards.
whatthehey - Wednesday, August 27, 2008 - link
Strangely enough, all of the stories related to this inevitably seem to lead back to the Inquirer "reporting". You'll pardon me if I just can't take anything from Charlie Demerjian seriously. This is the same guy that hates NVIDIA and Intel, so I hardly expect his take on the situation to be reliable. There are certainly some problems with some of NVIDIA's chips, but nothing has indicated this extends much beyond a few select chips (8400M, 8600M and 8700M I think).What specific laptop do you have that has had problems, and what GPU does it use? I know I have a laptop with an 8800M GTX and I've had no problems whatsoever. (It's one of the Clevo units.)
rjc - Wednesday, August 27, 2008 - link
The article i linked claims from their sources the problem chips are the G84, G86 and G92. They couldn't confirm if the G94 also had problems.Again from the article nvidia has sold a total of 70 million of these chips. If say only 1%-2% need to be replaced then nvidia will be ok, say 10% or more would be kind of disastrous. As its early days people are trying to extrapolate from the current failures to get the eventual overall rate.
Re shooting the messenger is a natural thing to want to do. I think psychologists call it "correspondence bias" where you assume the messenger has an agenda ie is evil and thus their message can be ignored.
Personally my laptop is a asus with a 8600gt a v1s. It idles at over 60C, heavy workload can push it into the 70s ie the danger zone from the article, finally games send it into the mid 90s. According to notebook-review forums asus is getting regular returns on their g1s gaming laptop which has a 8600gt and trying to replace them on the quiet. I guess they want to try and avoid the bad publicity dell and hp recently got.
Frallan - Friday, August 29, 2008 - link
Any1 heard about the C90s??Same chip - but other cooling however Im starting to get some very disturbing signs from mine.
Also yes it it the Inq-well but that doesn't mean its wrong. Analog Just because you are paranoid it doesnt mean they are not coming for ya.
;0)
/F
iwodo - Tuesday, August 26, 2008 - link
ARM with Nvidia Graphics, aka the Tegra. And Desktop, x86 with VIA Nano.I am sure with some Restructuring Nvidia could surely sell x86 in some form. As long as it take control of VIA by other means without losing x86 license.
Interconnect - there are already Hypertransport. Nvidia has the Chipset experience. And Dual Core Nano isn't exactly low performance either.
If AMD could do it, why not Nvidia?
Griswold - Wednesday, August 27, 2008 - link
"As long as it take control of VIA by other means without losing x86 license."Voodoo. But since that doesnt exist, its not going to happen. Which answers your last question.
shin0bi272 - Tuesday, August 26, 2008 - link
Nvidia seems to be too concerned with other things at the moment to do anything about Lucid's Hydra. I also dont think that the hydra engine cares what the instruction is it just passes it to the right video card and takes requests from the cards and passes them to the north bridge. Its like the Xor chip on a hardware raid5 card. It just sends what ever data is sent to it to the right card or reads from the different cards and sends those requests to the system. Its a traffic cop. Well thats how I see it anyway... whether or not it actually works remains to be seen.computerfarmer - Tuesday, August 26, 2008 - link
It is nice to hear new things and different takes on the subject.One thing I would like to see, is the promised review on the AMD 790gx/SB750.