Chip failures: Nvidia responds at last

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.