| Final-Fan said: Now this is coming from an insider who clearly has deep knowledge of what the situation was with MS both internally and strategically. He is very clear that (1) "bad luck" had little or nothing to do with the RRoD making it to customers; (2) RRoD would have been avoidable had MS not been rushing to market heedless of all danger; (3) The problem might have been exacerbated by particularly reckless management; (4) Sony was not "lucky" to avoid a similar fate (nor was Nintendo for that matter). Unless you plan to attack the credibility of this guy I think you had better pack it in Squilliam ... after all, consider what I was responding when I started our exchange: "OT: Nvidia recently fucked up and got a 40% failure rate on their GPUs. What does this mean? RROD could have happened to Sony just as easily. Its not that Microsoft is a screw up, its just that either Sony is Lucky or Microsoft is Unlucky depending on how you spin it. (Nvidia is the supplier of GPUs to Sony btw)" (emphasis added) It's clear that unless this guy is a complete liar this is just not true. |
According to our sources, the failures are caused by a solderbump that connects the I/O termination of the silicon chip to the pad on the substrate. In Nvidia’s GPUs, this solder bump is created using high-lead. A thermal mismatch between the chip and the substrate has substantially grown in recent chip generations, apparently leading to fatigue cracking. Add into the equation a growing chip size (double the chip dimension, quadruple the stress on the bump) as well as generally hotter chips and you may have the perfect storm to take high lead beyond its limits. Apparently, problems arise at what Nvidia claims to be "extreme temperatures" and what we hear may be temperatures not too much above 70 degrees Celsius.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvidia-GPU-failure,6248.html
Tease.
