Faulty chips? nVidia says, ‘Buy new ones!’
Does your MacBook Pro have a bad case of the bumps? Well, regardless of the viability of your new MacBook Pro, nVidia does not have any love for you, directly, but they do have a “solution” of sorts for their OEM partners, like Apple.
Which is an interesting position to leave Apple in, considering representatives for the GPU maker had until recently claimed with straight faces that their current MCP79-based chips (ie the ones used in the new MacBook Pro) were clean and unaffected by the bad bumps issue.
That said, much like the company’s late Summer 8M series mea culpa, nVidia’s back again with a not-for public-consumption admission of guilt to its OEM partners. According to the VR-Zone:
NVIDIA is committed to providing our customers with quality products that push the edge of technology and also continuously improve product quality and reliability. To help improve the product quality and ensure smooth and uninterrupted product supply during the current “end stage” of life cycle, NVIDIA strongly recommends that customers transition to this latest revision of the NB8E-SET GPUs as soon as possible. These latest revision units utilize “Hitachi” underfill packaging material that improves product quality and enhances operating life by improved thermal cycling reliability.
NVidia’s “new” NB8E-SET GPU is essentially the current NB8E-SE with the new underfill (aka bumps). Specifically, these parts use a new substrate, and are clocked at 625MHz core and 128-bit 800MHz GDDR2/3 memories similar to the current NB8E-SE.
Previously, nVidia’s 8M series chips were discovered to be the source of failures—notebook and desktop—because of problems with high-lead solder used. Then, the graphics chip maker made a lot of noise about how its 9M series chips didn’t carry the problem forward, a claim that turned out to be so much hubris as evidenced by the company’s latest memo (above) respinning their position.
Is nVidia finally schlepping chips that don’t create dangerous, portable killing levels of heat? Further, are Apple and nVidia ready to step up and take care of the problems unibody MacBook Pro owners are likely to encounter?
On the first point, I will believe it when see it and I fully expect The Inquirer, which has doggedly pursued the bumps issues so far, will cut open another MacBook Pro to again test nVidia’s veracity. On the question of responsibility, however, I sincerely doubt buyers of Apple’s pro portables will get a fair shake…
What’s your take?
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