Comment by smoldesu
5 years ago
It was a lot of he-says she-says with those chips, but as far as I understood it, it mostly came down to Apple using cheap solder. When the Nvidia chips inevitably started to heat up, it caused the solder to come loose which caused the notorious graphics issues. IIRC, there were even reports of people reviving dead or malfunctioning logic boards by doing ye olde "oven trick", which pretty much confirmed that it was an assembly issue, not a manufacturing one.
The "bumps" (industry term for solder left on bottom of chip to attach to a board/circuit) in question are specified by the GPU chip vendor, not Apple.
This is why every single NVidia customer during this period was affected, not just Apple. NVidia ended up making several large compensation payments to several big vendors such as HP too etc.
Its amazing how quickly people have forgotten what a big a deal this was, it was terrible for much of the laptop industry for a year or two. It was after "Bumpgate" as tech media termed it at the time that Apple's relationship with Nvidia ended too, coincidence or not.
> https://semiaccurate.com/2009/08/21/nvidia-finally-understan...
As for it being "he-says she-says with those chips", I can't agree. There was an entire settled class action lawsuit at the time directly blaming NVidia for all affected Dell, HP and Apple computers. I've had to raid web.archive.org, but you can still find the details:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101011074425/http://www.nvidia...
"Soldergate" impacted all vendors that shipped nVIDIA chipsets back at the time, and the cause was not "cheap" solder - rather, the back-then relatively new lead-free solder that was mandated by the European Union's RoHS directive in ~2005-2006. The manufacturers didn't have much experience with the stuff back then and chose a solder formulation that didn't hold up well to repetitive thermal stress.
See also the Xbox 360 RRoD plague from the same period.