On the graphics card front, Igor’s Lab made a rather unpleasant discovery concerning a PowerColor RX 9070 XT Red Devil. The card’s GPU has a number of imperfections. The problem with these imperfections is that they modify the card’s behaviour, even causing thermal throtling. A failure in TSMC’s quality control!
RX 9070 XT Red Devil: too many imperfections on the surface of the GPU!
After inspection under a microscope, Igor’s Lab discovered that the surface of its card’s GPU was covered with numerous imperfections, as can be seen above. These defaults, of which there are 1934, occupy more than 1% of the GPU‘s total surface area. In fact, the largest measures 212.36 µm in diameter, with a depth of 12.59 µm.
While these values may seem ridiculously low, they do have an impact on the GPU‘s behaviour. All these imperfections create irregularities in the surface of the die, which affects cooling. Locally, we can have temperature peaks in excess of 113°C, which triggers the card’s thermal throttling mechanisms. The result is a drop in frequency and performance.
If you’re wondering, these imperfections are formed during the polishing of the silicon wafer, after etching, in order to package the GPUs. Of course, quality controls are carried out to ensure that everything is fine, but there has obviously been a slip-up. TSMC (which produces the GPUs for AMD and NVIDIA) uses optical inspection machines in its inspection process, and something obviously went wrong.
AMD was quick to respond, stating that this was an isolated case and that the company had been working with its partners to understand what could have led to this situation. The question is whether other GPUs are affected by this problem or not. In the meantime, TSMC has had quite a few failures. We all remember the cases of missing ROP on NVIDIA’s RTX 50s.
