Taiwanese OEM maker sues AMD for defective chips

Taiwanese laptop OEM (original equipment manufacturer) Quanta has sued AMD for allegedly selling defective processors, but chipmaker refutes claims and adds that it no longer sells the particular chips.

According to a Bloomberg report Wednesday, Quanta filed a court claim in San Jose, California, alleging AMD and ATI Technologies sold chips that did not meet heat tolerances and were "unfit for particular purposes". The filing indicated that the processors were used in NEC notebooks and caused the devices to malfunction.

"Quanta has suffered significant injury to prospective revenue and profits," said Quanta   in its complaint, which also added that it was seeking a jury trial and damages, the report noted.

AMD refuted the claims. In a statement to Bloomberg, spokesperson for the chipmaker Michael Silverman said: "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," Silverman said. "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."

According to the news wire, Quanta is the world's largest contract maker of notebook computers and also make laptops for Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Acer.