“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,” Charlie Demerjian reports for The Inquirer.
“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,” Demerjian reports.
“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,” Demerjian reports.
“In a statement just before publication, Nvidia’s Mike Hara had the following comment on the situation. ‘The GeForce 9600 GPU in the MacBook Pro does not have bad bumps. The material set (combination of underfill and bump) that is being used is similar to the material set that has been shipped in 100s of millions of chipsets by the world’s largest semiconductor company,'” Demerjian reports.
Full article here.