Intel Atom chips have been dying for at least 18 months

Nasty if true, I have 18 atom C2550 touch screen PC's in use in client locations all are now about 18 months old and out of customer warranty but I am going to be in a bit of a moral dilemma if a processor fails prematurely due to this.

Question is how would I even tell if the fault was down to a faulty CPU and what should my moral obligations be to clients considering I am unlikely to get replacement motherboards off the manufacturer?

  which results in bricked systems

Is that choice of "bricked" deliberate? When I see "bricked", I assume irreparable and all contents unrecoverable -- does such a failure go beyond the Atom and destroy data as well?

As the Watergate scandal taught us, the cover-up is almost always much worse than the obvious alternative -- publicly admitting the mistake and making amends.

Would be interesting to know exactly why, at the transistor level, it is failing.