July 8, 2003

 FUJITSU FACES CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT

 As you may or may not be aware Fujitsu no longer makes IDE hard drives.  However, they must honor their warranty on these drives.  It was determined after the IDE production stop that there was a defective component in many of their drives.  Since Fujitsu was no longer manufacturing drives they simply replaced defective drives with defective drives.  Now there is a class action lawsuit against them.  Should they be surprised? 

The affected drives are 10, 20, and 40GB with model numbers starting with MP3Gxx.  Fujitsu states that the drives were manufactured between September 2000 and September 2001.  There were 10 million of these drives manufactured during this period.  Fujitsu claims only 2 – 3% of the drives will fail.  However, many system builders and OEM’s have come forward claiming 30% failure rates.  

Fujitsu is now pointing a finger at Cirrus Logic, the manufacturer of the alleged defective controller chip.  Cirrus Logic filed a suit against Fujitsu for non-payment.  Fujitsu doesn’t want to pay for the chips because they are defective.  I believe Fujitsu and Cirrus Logic should work together at a resolution to the problem instead of bickering about it.  A retrofit of the defective chip on replacement drives should be implemented.  Maybe that is too simple.  Too many attorneys would be left out in the cold. 

SUN NOT SHINING AFTER REALIZING AMD CAN’T BE THEIR FRIEND

Sun Microsystems has been a hostile customer of Intel for years.  They would rather not buy Xeon processors from Intel but they have no choice.  If Sun were to partner with AMD and start building Opteron based servers, their ultraSPARC based servers would suffer.  Why?  AMD’s chip is too good.  Sun fears that customers would realize the Opteron is pound for pound (or gig for gig) a much more cost effective 64bit processor.  They will continue to buy Xeon’s from Intel knowing that it cannot compete at the level of ultraSPARC. 

You may ask “Why don’t they just stop selling Xeon’s?”  Sun does not want to lose market share.  Therefore they offer low end Xeon based servers and high end ultraSPARC servers to cover all their customers’ needs.  (Sun offers the ultraSPARC in multiprocessor flavors up to 106 processors) If they switched to Opteron for the low end the ultraSPARC would look less attractive in many ways.   Considering Sun actually put this information in a  press release AMD has to be beaming with pride right now. 

 S&K