Slashdot Mirror
AMD Graphics Chips Could Last 10X To 100X Longer
An anonymous reader writes "According to a research report out of UCLA, released this morning, NVidia's high-lead bump packaging could last anywhere from 1/10th to 1/100th as long as AMD's advanced eutectic bump approach. (TG Daily has picked up the claim.) NVidia is currently in the midst of a $200M recall of bad GPUs, and the report suggests that the issue could be much deeper than NVidia's PR department would have us believe." The report lends credence to the strident claims of the Inquirer's Charlie Demerjian, which we discussed a month back.
I'm all for longer life chips, but what are Grahiphics ?
I was going to Google for that word but then I realized that kdawson was involved.
The report lends credence to the strident claims of the Enquirer's Charlie Demerjian
As in National Enquirer?
As in Real news?
--
Oh Well, Neutral Karma and all . . .
In my other life, I eat cats.
"Silicon doesn't wear out; microchips were effectively immortal. The Wig took notice of the fact. Like every other child of his age, however, he knew that silicon became obsolete, which was worse than wearing out"
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
The last nVidia card I bought failed almost the instant I took it out of the box. When installed, it worked - except for the loud clicking noise it made. Stopping the fan confirmed that it was the electronics themselves clicking! I'd hate to know what was causing the clicking, but the board died anyway.
Back it went under warranty. The new one STILL clicks, but it's soft enough that the fan drowns it out. (And I'm talking nVidia, so the fact that the original was able to click louder than the fan should tell you something.)
I have no idea if this solder issue really can cause the chip to click, but at least it explains why the cards die so easily.
Of course, the drivers still don't work, but at least it no longer blue-screens. It just crashes every other time you try to play a game.
...but with all the issues that have come out of nVidia products recently, I think it may be about time to switch over to ATI (again).
I actually started with ATI. Then I installed linux and started actually using it. I realized that the fglrx drivers just weren't worth the hassle, so my next card was nVidia, and I've stuck with them until now mainly for that reason. However, with the open source ATI drivers gaining support, it might be time to switch over.
Writing this I've come to notice that the actual performance issues between ATI and nVidia haven't ever been a main cause for me to choose between the two. I'm not saying that performance isn't an issue, but the choice between them (at least for me) was based mostly on reasons other than performance, including quality / life span of products, support (including tech support), and even company ethics.
Oh, and of course the whole whether it runs well on linux or not, but that's a given.
"Intelligence has nothing to do with politics!"
-Londo Mollari
What does 1/10th and 1/100th actually mean in standard solar days?
Can someone please provide a plot of the various solders and their performance vs. temperature and time?
I would like to see the plots for ====>
90Pb10Sn
60Pb40Sn
97Sn2.5Ag0.5Cu
99.3Sn0.7Cu
96Sn4Ag
99.25Sn0.75Cu
What is the risk associated with Tin? Especially Tin whiskers.
What kind of solders does the slashdot community use?
Nvidia has already switched away from high-lead solder.
The Inquirer reported on this whole fiasco.
People shit on The Inquirer a lot, but there are 3 awesome things about that site:
Their writers do not sign NDAs.
They have writers all over the world - not someone they send out, but people who live there.
Their writers intimately know people in the industry - from the people up top to the people at the factory floor.
I have tried three different ATI cards - all three ATI cards up and died on me within one year of usage, and I don't even play any graphics-heavy FPS games. After my most recent ATI card croaked (A Radeon X550, I think) I switched to Nvidia. So far my current Nvidia card has outlasted any ATI cards I've ever owned.
I had an early ATI Radeon card (7xxx something I think), which had terrible driver support, but I lived with it (and subsequent headaches of bad driver errors, the old "uninstall BEFORE you install the new drivers" nightmare). Then I got a 9000 Pro which was OK, until it became obsolete. I switched to an nVidia FX 5700 LE ("Lame Edition") which had good driver support but was woefully underpowered. Then I went back to ATI (what can I say, I was trying to support a "Canadian company") for an x800, which was OK until it became obsolete.
I found an X1350 pro on sale somewhere, which was great... until the new drivers borked all my Steam Source games, forcing me to run on year-old drivers. This was not fixed after six months of subsequent driver releases so when I built my new machine this summer I went back to nVidia and have not been disappointed.
For me, I don't really care about the minute differences between the cards either as long as the drivers are powerful, reliable and updated regularly. ATI lost my business, but on the flip side I haven't seen any updated nVidia drivers since July (unless they have been released in the last week).
That's a long-winded way of saying I agree with you, and adding that with this news about product life, nVidia better pull up its socks in the driver department unless it wants to lose fickle customers... although I won't be buying any ATI GPUs unless they're the only ones available.
This study does NOT specifically address or study AMD or NVidia's Chips.
It does not specifically address or test the exact chemical makeup of chips belonging to AMD or NVidia.
The conclusions being drawn as to the relative life spans of those manufacturer's chips appear to strictly belong to the bloggers who want a big headline, and not to the authors of the study. The study authors specifically note that in order to determine the life span of real chips, the real chips in question should be studied. Quote:
"For life-time prediction, the real microstructure of these two kinds of flip chip solder joint should be studied and actual failure rate should be measured. "
The study states that they are ignoring various factors that would come into play in the real world in order to simplify the study, and that they are making a number of assumptions about various testing conditions and about the makeup of the materials themselves.
From reading the study linked, it's not even clear to me that they actually tested anything, and it appears from their wording to be only a theoretical exercise.
In no way should the results of this study be used to state that brand X's chips will have a longer lifespan than brand Z's chips.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Yes you too can extend your chip 10 to 100 times for the low price of $39.95!
I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
My AMD processor will last until it's obsolete! Huzzah!
What's that? It's obsolete by the time it's shipped to my house? Huzzawwww...
The chips on my cards have always outlasted the fans on my cards. I have owned both nVidia and ATI cards.
Just because the chip - or at least, one aspect of the chip *could* last longer doesn't mean the card will.
Solid state devices should last decades.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Nvidia has already switched away from high-lead solder.
So, should I plan on buying a new card soon, when my solder snaps, or do I have a good one? How do I find out? Is this why my 7600 gave up the ghost so quickly? Have I already been a victim of this problem?
From TFA:
"£GDl/h' = 13.5/10. Clearly the strain in the eutectic SnPb layer (in the composite solder joint) is about one order of magnitude higher than that in the homogeneous eutectic SnPb solder joint."
What fucking dipshits! I can't believe those morons at NVidia didn't realize this. Any judge is going to take one look at this in a class-action lawsuit, and NVidia is HISTORY, man!
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I'm skeptical about the report, especially given the lack of any field studies with it. The useful life of a piece of computer equipment is usually 3-5 years; high-end graphics cards are probably shorter, because the main customers are gamers who need cutting-edge performance to kill orcs with.
So does "10-100 times longer" mean that significant fractions of nVidias are failing in 10 days - 3 months due to bad solder joints? Or does it mean that the solder joints in an ATI will last 30-300 years, long after anybody except a few retro gamers are interested in a graphics system that's mounted on a card in a separate box and doesn't interface directly to their optic nerves?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Most companies offer at least a year long warranty; if they have significant failures in that year, like 10-100x higher than normal, that may put too much pressure on their warranty policy.
And let's not forget nVidia's partners in selling cards (you know, all the non-nVidia nVidia cards). Those people may see high failure rates of nVidia parts, and all of a sudden using another chipset just got a heckuva lot more attractive.
So, the moral of the story is, there is no set 'time' that a card will die. It's not like after 10 months all of them will just conk out. But if there are higher failure rates than normal in their warranty period, not to mention harm done to their reputation, it could end up costing them greatly.
Just because you don't like the truth, does not make it false.
Now I'll have to seriously consider switching to unleaded.
Invenio via vel creo
Hi, I have a laptop under warrenty with an nvidia 6200M GS. It might be crashing when it gets hot. Yesterday it locked up while I was playing war3 demo in wine, which I have done since ubuntu 5.10 without problem on another computer. When it is hot, sometimes I will see what looks like a mesh of fabric on the LCD. This fabric is grey with a black background.
What do I say to Acer? Do I act dumb or say I know about the GPU's with low temperature soldier balls and they all will fail, and mine is going. ? Do I stand for them wanting me to ship 1000 km from Winnipeg to Toronto? Can't they just ship me another Aspire with 3GB, 250GB, intel core2duo 1.6 and a comparable speed GPU, and 15" LCD, dvd burner, camera, 5.1, stereo mics etc. ? I really just want a motherboard and I can install it myself, but know they won't like that.
Help!
obsolescence has nothing to do with the physical life-span of a video card. when a video card becomes obsolete depends primarily on the user and the application. what these articles are referring to is the physical life of the video card before it is expected to fail.
and not everyone uses their computer primarily for gaming. outside of gaming, technical obsolescence does not occur so quickly. at the moment i'm using a 5-6 year old workstation at work and at home. i do graphic design and web development, and both of these systems work just fine with the latest version of Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, QuarkXpress, etc.
the workstation i use at the office has had some memory upgrades, but aside from that, the occasional power supply, and a couple hard drives, the systems have held out just fine. my home system is a little more powerful, so i use it for more serious design work, but the office workstation is sufficient for print ads and web graphics. the video cards in either system were only about mid-range when they were first installed. i just needed a video card that supported 32-bit color depth since the integrated graphics controller only supported 24-bit truecolor. so beyond that, all that mattered was sturdiness and a long functional life-span.
my boss has recently offered to purchase a new workstation for me to use, but we'll probably keep the current workstation and just give it to one of the sales staff or someone else who only needs it for word processing, e-mail, web browsing, etc. as long as the hardware doesn't fail, the system is good for probably another 3-4 years.
"Since the plastic energy produced in the eutectic SnPb layer in the composite joint is about 100 times larger than that in the homogeneous eutectic SnPb joint, we expect the cycle times needs to fail the latter will be 100 times longer. But the above model is ideal, nevertheless it is reasonable to say that it is at the least 10 times longer. " A) They didn't test ANYTHING. B) They admit their ideal model is probably not realistic, and actual difference could be much less C) They admit this does not mean actual life-time of products and explicitly suggest testing in that regard. D) /. needs to stop posting sensationalist crap like this. The article is interesting, the title is bullshit. If I want sensationalism I will turn on my TV.
"Dictator Flakes. They WILL be delicious."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
but the advances made in the last year mean im fairly confident that by 9.04 composting will be fully supported and by the time i leave university ill be able to game on the opensource drivers.
I don't know what kind of advances they are making, but lots of them so called green folk would love to have an open source system that also composts.......... now that is what I call an eco-system....
Maybe they found a use for all those old floppy drives.
music lover since 1969
After the dive AMD took today in the markets, they better be long lasting, because it's going to be hard to find replacements.
To do list for Windows
Personally, I find that ATI is usually more bloated than nVidia. My first graphics card was an ATI, a Radeon 9250 I beleive, and it performed well. I still had it lying around on a shelf, and tested it the other day, and it still performed fine after 3 years of shelf-life. However, I will say that the control panel was very difficult to use.
I prefer nVidia myself, for three main reasons. First, although it is purely a personal choice, green and black strike me better than red on white. Second, the control panel is nice and small and tidy, with everything easy to find. Third, linux support for nVidia has proved much better, as I could not get another ATI (I forget the model) working 100% on linux at all.
Anyone have a preference?
--gmxgeek
There are new graphics cards every 6 months. My 7950GT is two years old "only" DirectX 9.0c. According to the "industry", I should have replaced it 23 1/2 months ago.
These cards have become disposable like most other components. If it's 2-3 years old, toss it and get a new one. Not what I believe in, but it's become the repair standard.
"What? $300-400 to fix my 4 year old laptop (hard drive + memory + wireless card + labor)? Fuck it! A new laptop is $600."
With the lead content, they're not RoHS-compliant.
Typical failure models use an exponential distribution, rather than a Gaussian distribution to model time-to-failure.
Anyone familiar with Nvidia's hiring practices could've predicted a disaster of this magnitude. They have absolutely moronic screening quizzes (yes, quizzes)... canned technical questions with only one "right" answer. Throw original thinking out the window, they just want to hire drones to do their dirty work. You know what Nvidia, you get what you deserve. Maybe they had a majority of good employees at one time, but the way they treat their people, I imagine there's been alot of brain drain. It's a clear sign of a failing company when they rely on marketing & sales to hide shoddy engineering. You had agood run Nvidia, but the last stop is coming up. Get off while you can, the train derails up ahead.
I can confirm the putting pressure on the warranty part. Dell just ran out of replacement Nvidia cards for the D620. 15 day wait list if yours fails.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Practically speaking, using an exponential distribution means this:
If you can expect a card to last (on average) one year when it's new, then, given that it's N months old, you can still expect it to last one year. An exponential distribution has no history.
It works surprisingly well.
the title says AMD lasts longer, and the article says Nvidia does. Make up your minds!
Last time I checked, one tenth and one-one hundredth are NOT the same as ten times (10X) and one hundred times (100X).
Has Slashdot been failing their math courses?
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
Last time I checked, one tenth and one-one hundredth are NOT the same as ten times (10X) and one hundred times (100X).
Has Slashdot been failing their math courses?
wir nat gud at spelings or maeths but wir gud at teknoliji.
[signature]
Warranties can be a significant selling point. The reason why I pretty much just by seagate drives is that they're pretty much the only ones that are willing to give me a decent warranty. It's worth it to me to pay a couple dollars more for a drive with a 5 year warranty rather than just get a 3 year.
But really it isn't so much about warranty coverage as it is about what that really means. A company isn't going to set a warranty period that's so long that they're going to have to replace a significant number of products. Which really ads up to confidence that the drive is unlikely to fail much before that.
My Dad just sent back a HP Pavilion 9300 laptop, which uses the 7xxx series mobile nvidia GPUs....the graphics chip had failed after just over a year, but HP have extended the warranties on this issue so they repaired free of charge.
Laptop came back with new system board, new bios etc...Machine lasted 3 days before graphics corruption set in again, and then the chip failed again later that day...
"NVidia is currently in the midst of a $200M recall of bad GPUs"
Last I checked, they reserved $200M on their financial sheets in case they needed to deal with the chips. I've heard nothing about an official recall? Only thing I can find is a lot of angry resellers who are demanding a recall.
Correct me if I'm wrong?
Yes, I was wondering about the fuzzy math
Why does the title say "10x to 100x longer" but the summary says "1/10th to 1/100th longer"?
STUPID.
You reminded me of this: Ted Nelson, Customer: But why do they put a guarantee on the box? Tommy: Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from me.
What's technolojay?
I just RMA'd my EVGA GTX 260 yesterday. It didn't even last 3 months. After about 1.5 months it was crashing frequently during gaming. By Sunday it couldn't even run Windows for more than a few minutes.
This card and the 8800GTS that I stepped-up from were my first NVidia cards. This experience will make me think about going back to ATI/AMD or possibly even Intel when I buy another card.
What's technolojay?
u iz uzin' it naow. an Iz wunt MOAR!