Bumpgate We break out the electron microscope
By Charlie Demerjian: Tuesday, 09 December 2008
WHEN THE NEW Macbooks came out a few weeks ago, Nvidia stated that the chips they provided to Apple did not contain the proverbial 'bad bumps'. Unfortunately for them, an investigation lead by The Inquirer proves that not to be the case. BackgroundIf you recall, Nvidia has been in the spotlight all summer for failing chips due to bad materials and thermal stress. The end result is that bumps, the tiny balls of solder that hold a chip to the green printed circuit board it sits on, crack, and the computer it is in dies. If you want the full technical analysis, read this article (and parts 2 and 3). Nvidia took a $200 million charge over the problem in July, but the firm refuses to support its customers by saying which parts are defective, and what computers they were sold in. You can get some clue from message boards, with Dell, HP, and Apple being prominent victims. Nvidia says that the problem only affects notebooks, HP says otherwise. Nvidia assures manufacturers that their machines won't have problems, manufacturers say otherwise. In the end, what you have is a massive cover-up that keeps affected customer s in the dark. Doing right by them would cost a lot of money, which says a lot about the reason for a cover up. Fixed parts with a new 'material set' - basically new bumps and underfill - were phased into production starting in mid-summer, and the old, defective bumps are being sold off slowly alongside the new.
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