Well, it seems that the total disaster that is M84 and M86 is going to cost much more than the $200 million US that Nvidia has set aside to deal with the issue; or so our moles are telling us. That is, of course, if Nvidia can get the problem resolved at all.

For those not in the loop it seems that Nvidia has a bit of a sticky situation with the M84 and M86, and it is causing all sorts of problems in a variety of notebooks/laptops; and OEMs are pretty unhappy with the ongoing problem.

Customers may be the ones left holding the bag in the end because right now Nvidia is only going to deal with 33 thousand notebooks/laptops that use these chips. This is kind of crazy, since there are millions of these chips installed out there.

In some cases from what we have been able to see, customers can easily rack up a quick $600 repair bill to get the problem properly resolved and dealt with. And this is if you can get your OEM/Vender to fix the problem under warranty at all.

For example, we have a report of a customer who sent a laptop in for repair and the company sent it back unrepaired, telling the customer that the CPU and motherboard were good, but the 8600 GPU was bad and not covered by their warranty.

The customer was forced to either purchase a new 8600 GPU to replace the bad one at a cost of $600 or suffer the cost of replacing the laptop. The customer opted to spend the $600 to buy the replacement 8600 for his laptop, and lucky for him it was on a removable module.

We are sure that we have not heard the last of this entire mess, but one thing is for sure, someone is going to have to eat the cost of replacing a lot of these chips; and we doubt that it will be the system vendor if they can avoid it. This goes without mention of all of the people who own a laptop/notebook with one of these chips in it and are wondering if it is defective.

All of these issues could be a very big advantage for AMD, as it is expected that they will pickup additional design wins for the next two product cycles by cashing in on Nvidia’s misfortune.