If you have an issue then fix it, dope/dot the tin/lead or use another material all together.
Incidentally that's the advantage of the EU directives, if they are forced to find a fix they will, if it's easier to not look they'd do that.

What, someone hired by AMD slams nVidia's problems? How novel!

Though I suppose he could be right, I think AMD is the last place nVidia wants any advice from.

Attention, Gerbils! Take note:

"This problem has shown up in notebooks because those systems get turned on and off a lot, but McLellan said plainly that folks who power-cycle Nvidia-powered desktops regularly should start seeing the same issues eventually."

Thermal cycling kills components, and here is yet another mechanism for how. Those of you who aggressively power cycle or sleep your machines are not saving as much as you think.

I have read the internal reports at Nvidia. The failures are pin specific to the pcix bus and it is mostly chipset related (c51).

Pin specific failures cannot be due to packaging material. Failures due to packaging material should be random pins near the corners of the die.

Let's see when Nvidia will come clean.

If you want to do your own research on Hi-Pb versus eutectic Sn-Pb solder bump reliability, go to IEEE database or your local university library and look up "High Lead", "Eutectic", "Electro Migration", "Finite Element", "Thermo Fatigue". Read these articles yourself.

High lead solder has 50 years of history from the IBM days. Niel Mclellan IS a hack. He stole credits from his engineers on numerous patents that he holds.

A soda can?

Save the world by eliminating lead! Doom technology by eliminating lead!

Sometimes I think the EU has become a bunch of Luddites, and are trying to indirectly make high-technology too expensive to be profitable, thereby killing the industry as a whole, or simply eliminating everyone but the giants who can afford to pay licensing and fines.

I still don't understand the benefit of removing lead from electronics. Last I knew nobody died or got brain damage from eating a PCB, or from soldering on one. I can understand removing lead from paints, toys, fuel, etc, but from high-technology? Just stupid.

Leave it up to politicians, and you wind up with more serious problems than just a little lead in an IC ball.

-LS

Niel Mclellan used to be my boss in my previous company. He's a hack and doesn't know what he's talking about; he relies on engineers below him to tell him what to say. I have not seen a single engineering observation from this guy the three years I've been working for him. How he got to where he is? God knows?

If you actually read academic studies and participate in engineering, you would know that high-lead solder is much more reliable to fatigue, electro-migration, and also creates a much less stressful package due to the decrease in collapse height during processing. Going with eutectic solder is only for cost reduction and only for small die size applications.

If you let the GPU get hot enough, the solder balls will re-solder themselves back onto the pad they were connected to.

It's interesting to hear it coming from an AMD guy, but isn't this (in a much less rambling way) what Charlie said at the start of september?

Next Intel offers their take on AMD's sales.....

Finally some hard details. I had read this was the likely problem, but was forced to visualize the issues based on vague descriptions up until now. Hope nVidia has an official statement to come.

Nvidia was so silent with its failures its like Intel. Sorry Nvidia will never comment on this maybe after 10 years

Informative and no sign of slammage good stuff!
^^^^^^^^^

Ah so never shutdown the computer... noted...

Cool description. Thanks for the write-up.