Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
prior article from the inquirer:
Nvidia chips show underfill problems
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Bumpgate Electron microscopes reveal a lot
WHEN WE TOLD YOU about the 'bad bumps' in the Apple Macbook Pro 15-inch models the other day, we expected it to end there.
But as luck would have it, Nvidia pointed us to a much deeper problem that not only affects at least some of the Macbook Pro notebooks, but likely every other high Temperature of Glassification (Tg) underfill chip Nvidia makes.
Technical Background
To understand this article, you really need to understand the problem, so please read the technical three part series (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) explaining what the problem is and where it occurs.
Nvidia's current problem stems from its half-hearted response to its earlier problem by only changing the underfill. Nvidia said that's what it did, both near the end of our initial Macbook article and in a later Cnet article here.
In that, Nvidia's Mike Hara said, "Intel has shipped hundreds of millions of chipsets that use the same material-set combo. We're using virtually the same materials that Intel uses in its chipsets." Note the word 'virtually'. The problem with this statement - other than his analogy being misleading and not addressing Nvidia's chip design problem - is that 'virtually' in this case means Nvidia missed a key coating component in its revised chip engineering design. It is NOT the same material-set technology as Intel, AMD, ATI and everyone else we talked with uses. Unfortunately for Nvidia, the coating material it left out is critical for the life of the chip.
Before we break out the electron microscope again, we feel the need to point out some of the things that Nvidia managed not to talk about in its purported explanation of the fix. It is sad to have to point this out, but underfill does not crack, bumps do. The bumps that cracked did so for a long chain of reasons that are explained in my earlier three-part article linked above.
[Rumour] AMD to release Evergreen Mobile chips in January 2010
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Published on Friday, October 30 2009 4:57 am by Sub
Following Nvidia's leaks of its "next-gen" GT 300M series, Nordichardware reports that ATI's DX11 mobile cards are arriving in January 2010.
I’ve had a string of GTX-280 cards just go purple screen of death.
No idea if it’s the same problem or not, but the new generation of ATI cards is better anyway.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
