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Inside Nvidia's Testing Facilities
An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad has up a behind the scenes look at NVIDIA's Santa Clara HQ. In addition to the usual shots of the server farm, they spend several pages talking about the Silicon Failure Analysis Lab which is the secret to NVIDIA's success as a fabless semiconductor company. They also have shots of NVIDIA's thermal analysis lab where they run the GPUs at 40 deg C and 0 deg C, and the Performance analysis labs."
An excellent Article! Finally a change from the mundane 'IT Cable Puller Assembles Software System to blah blah blah' Great to know that people are interested in what real engineers are doing. If course I do like the props given to the NVIDIA IT folks that keep everything humming nicely.
why use Intel Clovertowns when they have there own real good chipsets for AMD servers / work station systems?
What's worse, there doesn't seem to be any mechanism to report driver bugs to nVidia. I suppose you just have to hope they notice it and fix it in the next release.
It's not exactly rocket surgery.
"For consumer electronics, I guess the assumption is that if it's 40 degrees in your room, you're going to go find somewhere cooler to be, rather than sitting there with your PC blowing hot air on you."
I'm sure that's a good assumption in many situations, but I've sat outside on my computer during the day a few (read: every friday since school started back up) times this year when the temp was over 110 F. I was out there when it was 117 F running along just fine for almost 20 minutes before my class opened up.
It's not a bad assumption, in general the amount of time a computer's going to be running in >104 F is very small, but it's not exactly impossible.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing