A report claiming that Nvidia has been ousted from Apple laptop designs has gained prominence quickly because the graphics chip supplier is still dogged by past problems.
"The word is that Nvidia is out of Apple designs," according to a June 26 report from technology Web site SemiAccurate. The report has been cited widely with varying degrees of credence given to it.
"When I say out, I mean on the Nehalem-based Macs," Charlie Demerjian, the author of the report, said in a phone interview Monday, referring to future laptops from Apple that will be based on Intel's new Nehalem Core i series of chips.
Nvidia, not surprisingly, doesn't see it that way. "These rumors are baseless," an Nvidia spokesman said Monday. Apple had no comment.
Nvidia graphics processors are currently used widely in Apple MacBooks. And Apple has been touting a new technology in its upcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard operating system called OpenCL, which takes "the power of graphics processors" and makes it available to Snow Leopard for everyday computing tasks.
However, lurking below this push to tap into the compute power of the graphics processor lie past issues with Nvidia chips. A May 29 Apple knowledge-base article (Article: TS2377) couches frustration with Nvidia in diplomatic language, according to Demerjian. The article updates a similar notice Apple published in October of last year.
"Nvidia assured Apple that Mac computers with these graphics processors were not affected," according to the Apple May 29 statement. "However, after an Apple-led investigation, Apple has determined that some MacBook Pro computers with the Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor may be affected."
"The 8600M referred to in the Apple support page...had a particular material set," Nvidia said Monday, repeating a statement it has made several times in the past. "That particular combination of material set is no longer being used by Nvidia."
In a May 20 disclosure as part of a Form 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Nvidia said that some notebooks still have problems associated with its graphics chips.
And past statements from not only Apple but the world's largest PC makers lend weight to the tenor of SemiAccurate's assertions about Nvidia's chip problems, if not necessarily to the accuracy of the report's claims about Nvidia's future at Apple. Hewlett-Packard said last year that it had been grappling with Nvidia chip issues since November 2007. And Dell made a similar statement last year.
Writing about the SemiAccurate report, Broadpoint AmTech analyst Doug Freedman said Monday: "If the reports are indeed true...Although negative at the margins, this shortfall could be offset by new product ramps." Freedman cited upcoming products--that will offset any negative impact--such as Nvidia's Tegra chip for smartphones and its Ion chipsets for laptops and Netbooks.
Nvidia is in the throes of a minor meltdown. Its share price is collapsing as it grapples with widespread product defects, a resurgent Advanced Micro Devices, and a weak market.
It all started when Nvidia released a statement on July 2 saying it would take a $150 million to $200 million charge to cover the costs for repair and replacement of defective graphics silicon in notebook PCs. Though Nvidia didn't name any names, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Lenovo, among others, use Nvidia graphics chips in their notebooks.
Then on Thursday, July 3, shares plunged $5.54, or just over 30 percent, and closed at $12.49. And share prices have continued to fall--though how much of the post-30-percent drop can be attributed to the weak stock market is not clear.
"There are two piece of news. One is the technical problem, the other part is that (Nvidia) isn't happy with where their business is going," said Dean McCarron, principal at Cave Creek, Ariz.-based Mercury Research.
Keener-than-usual competition is adding to product-defect woes. "Pricing has been more aggressive," McCarron said, referring to more competitive products from AMD's ATI graphics unit. "They did make some price adjustments on their GPU (graphics processing unit) products based on AMD being more competitive," McCarron said.
PC makers such as HP and Toshiba are also using more AMD-ATI graphics chips in notebook PCs, though the impact of this trend may be felt later rather than sooner. "I wouldn't necessarily look at it as being a tremendous share shift. We won't know until the end of the quarter. My suspicion is that (this quarter) a market share shift could be a small component," he said.
Beyond Nvidia's internal problems and the inter-company rivalry with AMD, McCarron sees a bigger issue looming that may affect not only Nvidia in a big way but AMD and Intel, too. "I am seeing some early signs that the market is weaker than forecast. China in particular seems to be much softer," McCarron said. This is a concern because China is now driving a lot of the growth, he said.
Stateside, an ill-timed Rambus lawsuit against Nvidia falls into the kick-them-when-they're-down category. Rambus, which makes a living--though not that successfully in recent years--suing other companies for patent infringement, has now set its sights on Nvidia. The Los Altos, Calif.-based company filed a lawsuit Thursday claiming Nvidia products with memory controllers for synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDR) and double data rate memory (DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, and GDDR3) infringe 17 Rambus patents.
But product defects will be the big issue that dogs Nvidia over the summer and weighs on its stock price. Here is an excerpt from Nvidia's 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 2. "While we have not been able to determine a root cause for these failures, testing suggests a weak material set of die/package combination, system thermal management designs."
McCarron said in some cases "you're getting enough mechanical stress that you're actually breaking the bond between the chip and the motherboard" which can cause a system with an Nvidia chip to fail.
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