Nvidia is to rid itself of 6.5 per cent of its worldwide workforce, the graphics chip maker has admitted.

The cuts, which will see 360 Nvidia staff being handed redundancy notices, will have all been made by the end of October, when the chip maker's third fiscal quarter comes to a conclusion.

Nvidia's Q3 balance sheet will record a one-off cost of $7-10m to cover the cost of the job losses, which is as nothing to the $200m the company's had to set aside to ensure it can pick up the tab for the truckload of failed GPUs it admitted in July that it had shipped.

Those glitches have already affected Dell and HP. Dell recently extended the warranties with which it covers certain products, a direct result of Nvidia's problem GPUs.

Nvidia didn't associate this issue with the job cuts, instead saying it needed to make the headcount reduction "to allow for continued investment in strategic growth areas". It identified its Tegra system-on-a-chip and its CUDA parallel processing technology as two such strategic areas.

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