AMD has been slapped with a lawsuit by Quanta for allegedly selling faulty CPUs & GPUs that were unfit for purpose, since they didn't meet specified heat tolerances and subsequently failed. Taiwan-based Quanta may not have a name that the general public immediately recognizes, however they are actually the world's largest contract manufacturer of notebooks, so this lawsuit is a big deal. They claim that the faulty parts were used in notebooks made for NEC. The lawsuit was filed in a district court in San Jose, California and in the filing, Quanta claims they have "suffered significant injury to prospective revenue and profits". As Bloomberg reports, "the lawsuit also claims breach of warranty, negligent misrepresentation, civil fraud and interference with a contract."Unsurprisingly, AMD is fighting this lawsuit, with their California-based spokesman Michael Silverman emailing, "AMD disputes the allegations in Quanta's complaint and believes they are without merit. AMD is aware of no other customer reports of the alleged issues with the AMD chip that Quanta used, which AMD no longer sells. In fact, Quanta has itself acknowledged to AMD that it used the identical chip in large volumes in a different computer platform that it manufactured for NEC without such issues."

Quanta also has contracts to make notebooks for Hewlett-Packard, Dell. and Acer, who no doubt will be watching this lawsuit closely.

The lawsuit is titled: Quanta v. Advanced Micro Devices, 12-cv-12 and has been filed in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose).

So, is it the case that the chips are fine and the problem was actually the design of this particular laptop, or were the chips perhaps being run closer to their advertised tolerances and failed prematurely? It's also interesting that this lawsuit is about chips that are no longer made - how many generations back and how far back in time does this lawsuit go? What kind of talks were the companies in before the lawsuit was filed? We will report on this and detail the specific devices at the centre of this dispute if this information comes to light.

This case appears to have shades of the NVIDIA bumpgate scandal, where they were accused of making faulty GPUs due to an excessive number of failures. NVIDIA initially denied this, but eventually admitted to it in 2008 and in 2011 claims from the proposed class action lawsuit began to be processed. Could this Quanta v AMD case go the same way?