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Nvidia 55nm Parts Are Bad Too
JagsLive sends in a story (in somewhat inflammatory prose) from The Inquirer, which links to many others; they have been following developments in the alleged NVidia quality "fiasco" for some time. "Hot on the heels of its denials that anything is wrong with the G92 and G94s comes another PCN [Product Change Notification] that shows the G92s and G92b are being changed for no reason. Yup, the problems that are plaguing G84 and G86 are the same that affect seemingly all 65nm and now 55nm NVidia parts ... It is hard to overstate how bad this is. Basically every 65nm and 55nm NVidia part appears to be defective ... We are hearing of early failure rates in the teens percent for 8800GTs and far higher for 9600GTs ... To make matters worse, NVidia has a mound of unsold defective parts that they are going to bleed out into the channel along side of the (hopefully) fixed parts. As a buyer, you have no way of knowing which one you are getting ... Until NVidia comes fully clean on this fiasco, lists all the defective parts, and orders boxes clearly marked, you can't say anything other than just avoid them. Then again, since doing the right thing would likely bankrupt them, we wouldn't hold your breath for it to happen."
Sure, the GPU might be faulty but the rest of the components on their graphics cards (cooling fan, PCI-Express connector) are not showing any issues.
So let's not blow this out of proportion.
I'm a big tall mofo.
This is the kind of story that can only end with somebody being fired for making pizza in the silicon fab oven.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"Then again, since doing the right thing would likely bankrupt them, we wouldn't hold your breath for it to happen"
-5 Troll
...to buy Nvidia? Problem solved.
If you're a betting man, now's a good time to pick up on Nvidia stock.
The question is, do you feel lucky, punk?
It's been a long time.
I've got a two 8800 series cards (one 8800GT, one 8800GTS), and I live in a place with no air conditioning. If these cards were subject to heat failure the way the Inquirer has been hollering about - one or both would have died by now. Particularly the one in my wife's computer - it's a Shuttle box, which runs toasty. It's been rock solid, running 24/7 for more than a year now.
I'm not suggesting there is NO problem - but the Inquirer has been talking about this like all of these cards are just waiting to die. With no A/C, and temps in the house above 90F during the summer, they should be dead if the Inq is to be believed. Perhaps I'm just lucky, but I still aint buying the story.
"Nothing is so important that you cannot make fun of it." -Clarke
I don't get people who show any sort of devotion to a GPU manufacturer. I just don't. The author of this article is one of them. That doesn't mean it's not true, but he's written a number of articles that later proved to be completely false in the past, for instance saying that the 8800 series would doom nV because of low performance and high power usage compared to the 1900 or 2900, whatever ATI was releasing at about the same time. I'd suggest you not take any article written by Charlie seriously until it's been confirmed (not just repeated, as often happens) elsewhere.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I stopped reading when I got to "By Charlie Demerjian."
Seriously, this guy is to NVIDIA as Jack Thompson is to video games. It's just not as common knowledge that you shouldn't take him seriously.
has been proposed:
buy ati.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Yeah, because the Inquirer is such a steady and accurate news source.
I'll believe this when I see more proof.
I've got one too and was wondering exactly the same thing. From what I can tell the 8600GT has an 80nm process size, so it should be safe. Which is good, I really like this card.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I would say it's because lead-based solder actually works properly, but according to this story that doesn't seem likely to be their motivation.
I have an 8600GT too, hopefully it's OK...
But with ATI opening up their specs and open source drivers coming along nicely, and now this issue with nvidia chips, chances are my next videocard purchase will be from ATI.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
To make matters worse, NVidia has a mound of unsold defective parts that they are going to bleed out into the channel along side of the (hopefully) fixed parts.
This sounds very similar to what finally took down Weitek, back when there were a bunch of graphics chip companies competing hotly and being shaken out if they screwed up.
Weitek had built a very fast and powerful chip. But they had goofed: While it had the mandatory basic VGA mode for acquiring the Microsoft certification, there was a bug in it.
QA told management that the bug was there and would fail them. But Software told them a driver could work around it and people would want the chip because it was so fast on graphics rendering. (Of course it could not - because to get the cert it had to work with the stock bootstrap stuff, before a custom driver could be loaded.)
So they went to production with the bug. And the customers got their prototypes, found the bug, and demanded a fix. Eventually they did a fixed version - but had maybe a couple million of the buggy ones on hand and wouldn't sell the fixed ones unless the customer bought some buggy ones, too. So nobody bought and the company folded.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
IMNSHO, the quality control at both companies has been terrible for several years now. What's the point of paying a premium for a good graphics card, if hardware problems make your system unstable as soon as a demanding game is loaded or the drivers take out your operating system at random intervals? It's not like this has happened only on bleeding edge cards with new drivers, either: several entire models have had basic incompatibilities with other common system components, and sometimes drivers have been unacceptably poor for the entire useful lifetime of a gamer's card.
Contrary to the marketroid reports, it is not in any way unavoidable that new cards with new drivers have to crash a significant fraction of the hottest games at release time. It's not like these kinds of problems are subtle and might be missed during a decent period of testing, and it's not like the card vendors couldn't co-operate with the game vendors on a beta test programme. This happens because commercially, it makes more sense for them to race to market with inadequately tested hardware and poorly engineered driver software and hope they can patch up any widespread problems later with a minimal PR hit. As long as both the big names are as bad as each other, consumers in the target market are pretty much screwed anyway.
It's about time something like this happened and one of the companies took a major financial hit as a consequence. Perhaps then we'll move back towards supplying hardware and drivers that actually, you know, work. Gamers the world over (other than those currently suffering from these problems, of course) should probably be happy about this, because it might be serious enough this time to make a difference to future quality control, which is much better than a significant fraction of people being disappointed with each new model but never enough of a critical mass to really punish the company that supplied substandard kit.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
rohs has exceptions for very fine pitch stuff iirc.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
We're not unreasonable here, nobody's going to eat your eyes.
It is hard to overstate how bad this is.
This will end all life on earth.
That wasn't hard.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
I am neither an NVidia or ATI fanboy (heck, my current GPU is an integrated Intel), but this article is a steaming pile of crap.
Somehow, he takes a report of a routine running change to the production process (a new kind of solder), and magically turns this into some wild tale of how NVidia is shipping thousands of defective parts that will remain in the field.
Completely lacking is how he corresponds the running change to some defect...
SirWired
I'm not at all sure your criticism is based on the correct quotation source; cf: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche#The_Gay_Science_.281882.29 Now back to nvidia....
WRT to beef though, salmonella poisoning by beef is almost completely unheard of - chicken yes, beef no. Where this whack job got his numbers from is anyone's guess but they are wrong.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
No, you are just most likely American. The problem for you guys is as a customer you have next to no rights, very limited warranties removes the need to make proper products.
In EU however, most places now require 2 year warranty, that means all the good hardware is being shipped here because they don't want to be stuck with a customers problem 1,5 years down the road.
Charlie at The Inquirer has no credibility when it comes to nVidia.
From TFA, nVidia is changing from high lead to eutectic (tin) solder - for RoHS compliance - and has issues a PCN to that effect. Charlie has latched onto this as "proof" of his claim that all nVidia chips are faulty and overheat.
What Charlie doesn't explain is how switching from high-lead solder (5/95 Sn/Pb) to eutectic solder (63/37 Sn/Pb) - which has the lowest melting point of all tin-lead solders - is supposed to help if the chips are overheating. Nor does he explain how changing the solder material has any relationship to changing the underfill material on some mobile chips (other than they were both PCNs.) But hey, why let facts get in the way of a conspiracy theory/page hits?
I wonder if we'll ever see graphics card makers use socket GPU's (or maybe it's been done before).
Could be a useful thing if they start coming out with multi-GPU cards... if you can't afford a dual-GPU then add it in later.
Contrary to your belief that 'these kinds of problems are subtle and might be missed during a decent period of testing' it can be EXTREMELY difficult to find these kinds of problems. Beyond your wildest imaginings difficult.
Having worked on high performance hardware/software systems as an engineer I can tell you from first hand experience that the situation is more like there are 999,999,998 ways for things to go wrong and about 2 ways you can get it right, and those 2 ways are not AT ALL obvious. Usually the types of problems you encounter HAVE no obvious cause and no obvious solution and mostly can't be reliably replicated. They can stem from the very most subtle differences between two boards or systems. A cap that happens to be a bit out of spec and a slightly less than perfect solder joint can combine to create an error that happens 1 out of every 100 billion times an operation is performed.
Now, combine that with the fact that you have a dozen vendors slightly varying implementations of a given board design, PCs of all different types and quality levels running at different speeds with different CPUs in them, running a plethora of different versions and subversions of OS and drivers and applications, and the real miracle is you can make a board that works reliably at all.
Any attempt to make a really seriously bullet proof product that would virtually never have problems is simply infeasible. There is a law of diminishing returns involved. At a certain point you have to say "Well, we've tested it in 10 dozen different systems under 6 different OS versions with 128 different apps, and we get N number of crashes/malfunctions per hour of runtime." and then you call it a day. You could spend 10x more time and money on QA and reduce the failures to N/2, but you also won't sell much product when multiply your NRE by a factor of 10...
Plus such perfection will be for naught because MS will release BrokenOS patch "friday the 13th" 2 days later and you'll STILL be encountering the higher error rates. Same goes for new motherboards, games, etc. It is just a loosing proposition.
All you can realistically do is what they do now, test the heck out of it as best you can afford to, ship it out the door, and try to address any issues that come up later as quickly and painlessly as you can.
This is the kind of reason why military and aerospace grade hardware costs 2000x more than electronics with similar functionality with civilian retail/commercial specs. They REALLY do have to be certain things work exactly right or people die, and it is WAY expensive.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Yes there is an exception in RoHS for lead solder that has a high melting point. However, the official RoHS rule is that while lead solders in general are prohibited, there is an exception allowing for the use of lead solder that contains at least 90% lead. The idea being that solder with at least 90% lead melted at a higher temperature and was at least somewhat safer if disposed of improperly. Otherwise, potentially there may also have been no replacements for high lead content solders that performed as well when the first RoHS directives were drawn up in 2003. Currently (2008), however, there are lead-free solders that would work, but the lead free solders are more expensive than lead based solders (by roughly three times). Using a lead-free solder with a significantly different composition may also require a new packaging design and another extensive round of qualification, too. I am not totally sure how this would be done.
It get worse, the new solder to be used by nVidia mentioned in this Inq article states that it will only contain 63% lead and 37% tin, making nVidia based cards with this solder not saleable to consumers in the EU according to RoHS directives. The replacement 63Pb/37Sn solder has a somewhat better tensile strength and a lower coefficient of thermal expansion than the older 95Pb/5Sn solder, which may be why nVidia chose this route to fix the problem. Whether nV will be selling very many products in the EU with this fix and whether this will correct the problems, is another issue.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.