THE INQ CAUGHT up with Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun Huang at his post key note Q&A earlier and asked him why the company wasn't disclosing information about their bad chips.

"How could you guys possibly even say that?" he replied, looking peeved. "The first person in the world who talked about the chip issue was me," he said, adding "I issued a press release with a 200 million dollar reserve and, in fact, our customers were saying 'Jen Hsun, why did you do that? "

Well, why did he do that? According to Huang, "The logic is impeccable. We know that there are some failures that are associated with our chips, we know that it's related to specific combination of the chip and the design of the notebook."

Battling to defend himself, Huang continued, "Most of the notebooks are fine. my notebook is fine." Well good for you. Aren't you lucky, eh?

But Huang was adamant that everything that could be done was being done to solve the problem.

"I go to the OEM and tell the OEM, 'lets fix that, no questions asked. lets just go solve it. In fact, I'll put a reserve in place, so that if you were to solve it, I'll pay you back," he claimed.

"Now, I just sold a chip for $20 and I might have to spend $200 to help repair a notebook. Just think about that for a second. Nobody has ever done that before," Huang reckoned, adding with nauseating noble flourish, "I just don't want the consumers to have to fight the process." Awww, what a sweetheart.

It seems, however, that people can be cruel and unwilling to trust the selfless goodness of Nvidia.

Huang said, "It's a little bit messy because the competition wants to stir it up and there are people who want to stir it up, but its not really that complicated in the end."

Huang also admitted, "We're seeing a higher than what we would like to see failure rate, but if the consumer has a failure to report, I can get it fixed right away."

Asked if he would like to point a finger at anyone in particular, Huang rephrased the query stating, "I guess the question is, Who's to blame?" By way of answer Huang noted, "We use an industry standard process, how we manufacture the chip is identical to a lot of companies and this particular bump underfill material has been used to manufacture billions and billions of chips, not billions of chips."

He added, "It's just there's a happy circumstance or unhappy circumstance that just happens to be exactly right on power, thermal...and just happened to hit that spot." But, said the Nvidia chief, "Ultimately the way I look at it is there's nobody to blame."

"But who's responsible?" he went on, "I'm going to stand up and be partly responsible, and the OEMs obviously we're working with, they feel that because its their notebooks they're partly responsible. If anybody else volunteers to be responsible, I'm happy to let them be part of that. But I don't need to wait for anybody else."

Huang also revealed that it was consumers who first discovered the problem, and that it was very difficult to recreate the failure in a lab. " It took a long long time to make it fail," he said, adding that the defect was not detectable at shipping.µ