Quanta sues AMD over dodgy chips

Taiwanese manufacturer Quanta has sued AMD, claiming that dodgy processors it used in NEC notebooks couldn’t handle the heat. According to Bloomberg, Quanta has filed suit against AMD claiming that processor it supplied were more liable to break under industry-standard thermal processes and caused NEC systems built by the …

[cocknee]

looks like it'll be the lawyers winning again. Though if the story is true, it looks like blame passing for internal design issues if they've not had trouble their other lines with the same CPU.

I'll wait with bated boredom

[DryBones]

Better Headline Than

Quanta Coughs to Crappy Chassis Cooling

[LuMan]

Can't stand the heat..

So, basically, Quanta have made boards/units with such bad heat dissipation properties that the processors fail?

Surely Quanta should be spending their time investigating why previous implementations of the same chip worked fine instead of buck passing.

..ho-hum..

[Giles Jones]

It's no the first such case, look up the "NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT" issue.

Basically such chips are supplied in BGA form, there's no pins just an array of solder beads and the chips are baked onto the board. But the solder has to survive two things:

1. The heat from the chip, you don't want the solder reflowing.

2. Expansion and contraction as the computer warms up and cools down (used to be called chip creep when such chips were socketed).

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually...

Its more to do with lead free solder than BGA's.

Lead free/eutectic solder is god awful for soldering especially where high thermal stress patterns will repeat (Heating cooling cycles) the flexing and ultimately breakage of the solder.

Use leaded solder and all these problems go away.

MS are well clued up onthis particular downside to lead free solder.

[Anonymous Coward]

It also helps when the manufacturers (Sony in my case) actually put decent (or any) thermal paste between the cooler

[Al 4]

Chinese tripping up Taiwan?

Sounds to me like maybe they got a batch of counterfeit Chinese chips. Or these were rejected chips that instead of being destroyed were package for sale to an unsuspecting company.

[Anonymous Coward]

Suing for profit

Sounds to me like a bad business model company is looking to profit by suing a CPU supplier.