Comment on Xbox 360/PS3/(to a lesser extent) Wii owners represent
Thorry84@feddit.nl 4 weeks ago
Are you referring to the red ring of death on the Xbox? Because that has absolutely nothing to do with ATI. They just made the chips, it’s Microsoft that put them on the board. Most of the issues were caused by a poor connection between the chip and the board, not a hell of a lot ATI could do about that.
A lot of it was engineers underestimating the effect of thermals between 80 and 95 degrees for very long times, with cool down cycles in between. The thinking was this was just fine and wouldn’t be an issue. It turned out it was an issue, so they learnt from that and later generations didn’t really have that issue.
heythatsprettygood@feddit.uk 4 weeks ago
As far as I am aware, the 360 GPUs had faulty solder connections (due to poor underfill choice by ATI that couldn’t withstand the temperature) between the chips and the interposer, not the interposer and the board, shown by the fact that a lot of red ring 360s show eDRAM errors (i.e. can’t communicate to the module on the same interposer, ruling out poor board connections). Microsoft even admitted this in a documentary they made (link), where they said it wasn’t the board balls, it was the GPU to interposer balls. A similar underfill choice is also why there are slightly higher failure rates of early Wiis, although nowhere near as bad as 360 due to the low power of the GPU on there.
cepelinas@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
I thought tsmc chose the poor underfill.
heythatsprettygood@feddit.uk 4 weeks ago
It’s hard to say for certain whose final call it was to do this underfill (it’s a tossup between ATI’s design engineers and the packaging partner they chose ), but at the end of the day it is ATI’s responsibility to validate the chip and ensure its reliability before shipping it off to Microsoft.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
I always heard that was tsmc’s decision.
jyl@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
I don’t know how much of it was ATI’s fault or the fab’s, but my understanding is that no one had experience handling that amount of heat.
heythatsprettygood@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Agreed, thermals were increasing faster than most manufacturers could handle. Only real exceptions in this time I can think of were IBM (because they had to, PowerPC G5 was such a power hog it pissed off Apple enough for them to switch architectures) and Intel (because they also had to, Pentium 4 was a disaster).