According to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang (pictured), it was him who insisted to tell the world about the quality issues in some of the Nvidia chips. Not his customers -the PC makers- who were more concerned that the press will start asking questions about the failures and pushing for an industry-wide recall.

"The first person in the world that talked about the chip issue was me, right? I issued a press release with a $200 million reserve and in fact our customers were saying 'Jen-Hseng why are you doing that?'", the Nvidia CEO said in a press briefing.

For Huang, Nvidia's handling of the chip failures and subsequently the recall was impeccably logic but messy. "We know that there are some failures associated to our chips. We know its specifically related to a combination of the chip and the specific design of the notebook [because of more challenging thermal environment]... Sometimes it will fail. Most of the notebooks are fine... It's just that certain notebooks have this problem", Huang added.

Nvidia CEO also claims to be the first in the semiconductor industry to handle a chip recall that way

"I just sold a chip for $20 and I might have to spend $200 to help repair a notebook... Nobody has ever done that... Marvell never done that when it had issues. Broadcom never done that and they had issues... I just don't want the consumers to have to fight the process".

But who's to blame on the chip failures. Apparently for Huang, the bucket stops at his desk.

"We use an industry standard process. How we manufacture the chip is identical to a lot of companies... In this particular problem, we bought a material that was used to produce billions and billions of chips, not millions. It's just that there's an unhappy circumstance [power, thermal] that kind hit that spot. The way I look at it, there's no one to blame.

As it turns out it took a long long time to make it fail. It took us months on months on months to figure out a way to make it fail in labs. And even now, it's an extraordinary challenge. It just takes a long time. It's not a functionality problem and it's not detectable at shipping. It's a reliability call that happens on very unique situations", Nvidia chief admits.

Here's the video of Huang's response on the chip failures (apologies for the bad video quality due to low lighting):