The Tech Report has had a long conversation with nVIDIA about those small little problems that were popping up in certain Dell laptops.  It would be naive to expect nVIDIA to come completely clean with the public about the exact nature of the problems as well as their cause(s).  On the one hand it can honestly be difficult to pin down the root of the failures and on the other … well they do have a business to run.  However you look at it though, two points nVIDIA made seem very odd.  Stating that AMD the only company to use a power redistribution layer is plain wrong, as is their claim that high lead bumps are extremely prone to failure.  High lead solder bumps can fail due to heat but are used by a huge number of manufacturers and eutectic solder bumps are the only other choice and have their own issues.  See of you can spot any other errors.

“After almost two weeks of wrangling with its legal department, Nvidia has finally answered some of our questions about its GPU and chipset failure problems. First, the company sent us a statement addressing the allegations of AMD’s Packaging and Interconnect Director, Neil McLellan. As we wrote earlier this week, McLellan claims AMD has a superior chip package design because it uses a specific set of materials, including eutectic solder bumps. In his view, Nvidia chips have failed because they use (supposedly) more fatigue-prone high-lead bumps and because, he asserted, Nvidia cares less about packaging technologies.

Once Nvidia was done addressing McLellan’s accusations, the company answered our questions about potential desktop GPU issues, the failing Nvidia-powered HP desktops we heard about earlier this week, and whether the GeForce 9400M chipset in Apple’s new MacBooks could also face problems. Read on for all the juicy details.”

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