6 ms·

Another drawback the article doesn't mention is tight component coupling removes the ability to treat the components as separate pieces. This can make repair or

Another drawback the article doesn't mention is tight component coupling removes the ability to treat the components as separate pieces. This can make repair or upgrades extremely difficult. This might be desirable for companies against the right to repair; if it's illegal to use software to prevent repair, making it sufficiently difficult by hardware design is a possibility.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sneakernets 7y ago
This sounds like making the entire motherboard an equivalent of an epoxy blob.
repair_man 7y ago
Is anybody actually repairing a faulty motherboard? Let's one of the chips or some resistor is broken.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- zeta0134 7y ago
  Yes, quite often in fact. On older motherboards, often the only problem is something benign like a blown capacitor, which is a few cents at the hardware store and a few minutes labor to desolder the old and attach the new. It's a really common part to wear out due to heat stress, and it manifests as funky logic problems, since the caps are mostly there to clean up the line noise. I've saved a few flatscreen monitors this way, that were flickering and unusable; I'll take a $5 handful of parts over a new $179 monitor any day of the week.
  - littlestymaar 7y ago
    I have a friend who buy disfunctionning TVs for a few euros, and most of the time (8-9 over 10) there is only one broken capacitor that need replacement. He makes maybe one hundred euros every month by doing so, with really little work.
  - ryanwaggoner 7y ago
    I have only a rudimentary understanding of electronics and what the various components do, so this may be a dumb question, but how on earth do you diagnose an issue like this? If my monitor dies or my printer stops working and I open it up, I’m completely bewildered at what steps you’d take to figure out that some random resistor or capacitor out of (what seems like) thousands of components is the one causing the issue. Do you just go through and test each one with a multimeter until you find it?
    - jabl 7y ago
      Faulty capacitors often bulge, so you can find them by visual inspection.
      - userbinator 7y ago
        Bulge, or even just burst open and start leaking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Al-Elko-bad-caps-Wiki-07-02-17.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Al-Elko-bad-caps-Wiki-07-...
    - zeta0134 7y ago
      That's the general idea, yeah. I always start with the power supply because that part is under the most electrical strain, and tends to get hot. That means its components are often both the first to fail, and the most likely to cause weird problems when they do fail. Other than that, it's just intuition about how I think the device probably works, and a lot of trial and error. Major bonus points if there's a datasheet available, or a kind forum poster has had a similar problem to give me a lead on where to look.
    - bradstewart 7y ago
      If a consumer electronic device suddenly refuses to power on, it's a failed electrolytic capacitor most the time (in my experience). Finding them requires effectively no knowledge of circuits. Sometimes one is visibly deformed/exploded, but I usually just replace them all. If that doesn't work, yea you pretty much start testing things with a multimeter starting from the power source. But if it isn't a capacitor failure, it's probably ESD or power-surge related damage and not worth trying to fix.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    The "capacitor plague" is such a common problem, and there was a notorious run of bad ones with a defective electrolyte from the late 90s to mid 2000s, that there is even a site dedicated to it: badcaps.net There is an extremely detailed article about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
  - _delirium 7y ago
    I know that hobbyists do this on vintage equipment, repairing '80s home computers and such. But is it at all common at scale with recent motherboards? I find it hard to believe that any substantial percentage of 2010s motherboards that fail are being diagnosed, repaired, and put back into service.
    - BAReF00t 7y ago
      What do you think happens to electronics that are sent back during warranty due to being defective? They are mostly "refurbished" (=repaired and cleaned), and then sold again. If possible, even as new. Or, of course, sent back fixed.
      - _delirium 7y ago
        I'd be open to any contrary numbers on this, but my expectation has been that most mobos pulled out of service, especially by high-volume operators like the AWS datacenters, are just junked, not repaired or refurbished.
- ryukafalz 7y ago
  You should check out Louis Rossmann's videos on YouTube - he does exactly this. This one's not on his channel but is a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0S1ku9xvDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0S1ku9xvDI
- jdnenej 7y ago
  I have seen videos of people buying in batches of broken game consoles and replacing USB connectors and charge controllers since they often break and are not too hard to replace with the right tools. I also spoke to someone from Russia who worked as a electronics repair person fixing things we would normally throw away because the price of new equipment is very high compared to the price of an expert's time to fix it.
lettergram 7y ago
That might be fine if they can produce them cheap enough... I’m sure the same arguments were said when the CPU switched to having non-repairable transistors
richdougherty 7y ago
There is this section, which acknowledges the problem of replacing components: "We also need to consider system reliability. If a dielet is found to be faulty after bonding or fails during operation, it will be very difficult to replace." Their proposed solution (which is not repair): "Therefore, SoIFs, especially large ones, need to have fault tolerance built in. Fault tolerance could be implemented at the network level or at the dielet level. At the network level, interdielet routing will need to be able to bypass faulty dielets. At the dielet level, we can consider physical redundancy tricks like using multiple copper pillars for each I/O port." Your point is still valid, just wanted to call out their their thoughts on the issue.
- nine_k 7y ago
  Big CPUs / GPUs already have physical redundancy, and a way to cut / rewire a limited amount of faulty parts by laser etching in the die, prior to packaging.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    Cell processors are interesting because they do quite a bit of binning on a user facing SPI slave. You shift a thousand or so bit payload into it from a support/binrg up processor that tells it which pieces are disabled, how the PLLs are configured, etc. Hacked PS3s could reenable the binned off 8th SPE for instance.
- jdnenej 7y ago
  That doesn't seem to solve the issue of when a chip fails all together. While difficult, it's not impossible or unheard of for people to replace chips on a PCB like a charge controller that has fried.
- BAReF00t 7y ago
  It’s not just about faults. But about customizability and upgrades! I like to choose how much RAM and storage and which ports I want with how many generic, vector, FPGA and neural cores, thank you very much. And I like to change them later, to upgrade gradually. Even buses.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sneakernets 7y ago

This sounds like making the entire motherboard an equivalent of an epoxy blob.

repair_man 7y ago

Is anybody actually repairing a faulty motherboard? Let's one of the chips or some resistor is broken.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zeta0134 7y ago
Yes, quite often in fact. On older motherboards, often the only problem is something benign like a blown capacitor, which is a few cents at the hardware store and a few minutes labor to desolder the old and attach the new. It's a really common part to wear out due to heat stress, and it manifests as funky logic problems, since the caps are mostly there to clean up the line noise. I've saved a few flatscreen monitors this way, that were flickering and unusable; I'll take a $5 handful of parts over a new $179 monitor any day of the week.
- littlestymaar 7y ago
  I have a friend who buy disfunctionning TVs for a few euros, and most of the time (8-9 over 10) there is only one broken capacitor that need replacement. He makes maybe one hundred euros every month by doing so, with really little work.
- ryanwaggoner 7y ago
  I have only a rudimentary understanding of electronics and what the various components do, so this may be a dumb question, but how on earth do you diagnose an issue like this? If my monitor dies or my printer stops working and I open it up, I’m completely bewildered at what steps you’d take to figure out that some random resistor or capacitor out of (what seems like) thousands of components is the one causing the issue. Do you just go through and test each one with a multimeter until you find it?
  - jabl 7y ago
    Faulty capacitors often bulge, so you can find them by visual inspection.
    - userbinator 7y ago
      Bulge, or even just burst open and start leaking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Al-Elko-bad-caps-Wiki-07-02-17.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Al-Elko-bad-caps-Wiki-07-...
  - zeta0134 7y ago
    That's the general idea, yeah. I always start with the power supply because that part is under the most electrical strain, and tends to get hot. That means its components are often both the first to fail, and the most likely to cause weird problems when they do fail. Other than that, it's just intuition about how I think the device probably works, and a lot of trial and error. Major bonus points if there's a datasheet available, or a kind forum poster has had a similar problem to give me a lead on where to look.
  - bradstewart 7y ago
    If a consumer electronic device suddenly refuses to power on, it's a failed electrolytic capacitor most the time (in my experience). Finding them requires effectively no knowledge of circuits. Sometimes one is visibly deformed/exploded, but I usually just replace them all. If that doesn't work, yea you pretty much start testing things with a multimeter starting from the power source. But if it isn't a capacitor failure, it's probably ESD or power-surge related damage and not worth trying to fix.
- userbinator 7y ago
  The "capacitor plague" is such a common problem, and there was a notorious run of bad ones with a defective electrolyte from the late 90s to mid 2000s, that there is even a site dedicated to it: badcaps.net There is an extremely detailed article about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
- _delirium 7y ago
  I know that hobbyists do this on vintage equipment, repairing '80s home computers and such. But is it at all common at scale with recent motherboards? I find it hard to believe that any substantial percentage of 2010s motherboards that fail are being diagnosed, repaired, and put back into service.
  - BAReF00t 7y ago
    What do you think happens to electronics that are sent back during warranty due to being defective? They are mostly "refurbished" (=repaired and cleaned), and then sold again. If possible, even as new. Or, of course, sent back fixed.
    - _delirium 7y ago
      I'd be open to any contrary numbers on this, but my expectation has been that most mobos pulled out of service, especially by high-volume operators like the AWS datacenters, are just junked, not repaired or refurbished.
ryukafalz 7y ago
You should check out Louis Rossmann's videos on YouTube - he does exactly this. This one's not on his channel but is a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0S1ku9xvDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0S1ku9xvDI
jdnenej 7y ago
I have seen videos of people buying in batches of broken game consoles and replacing USB connectors and charge controllers since they often break and are not too hard to replace with the right tools. I also spoke to someone from Russia who worked as a electronics repair person fixing things we would normally throw away because the price of new equipment is very high compared to the price of an expert's time to fix it.

lettergram 7y ago

That might be fine if they can produce them cheap enough... I’m sure the same arguments were said when the CPU switched to having non-repairable transistors

richdougherty 7y ago

There is this section, which acknowledges the problem of replacing components: "We also need to consider system reliability. If a dielet is found to be faulty after bonding or fails during operation, it will be very difficult to replace." Their proposed solution (which is not repair): "Therefore, SoIFs, especially large ones, need to have fault tolerance built in. Fault tolerance could be implemented at the network level or at the dielet level. At the network level, interdielet routing will need to be able to bypass faulty dielets. At the dielet level, we can consider physical redundancy tricks like using multiple copper pillars for each I/O port." Your point is still valid, just wanted to call out their their thoughts on the issue.

nine_k 7y ago
Big CPUs / GPUs already have physical redundancy, and a way to cut / rewire a limited amount of faulty parts by laser etching in the die, prior to packaging.
- monocasa 7y ago
  Cell processors are interesting because they do quite a bit of binning on a user facing SPI slave. You shift a thousand or so bit payload into it from a support/binrg up processor that tells it which pieces are disabled, how the PLLs are configured, etc. Hacked PS3s could reenable the binned off 8th SPE for instance.
jdnenej 7y ago
That doesn't seem to solve the issue of when a chip fails all together. While difficult, it's not impossible or unheard of for people to replace chips on a PCB like a charge controller that has fried.
BAReF00t 7y ago
It’s not just about faults. But about customizability and upgrades! I like to choose how much RAM and storage and which ports I want with how many generic, vector, FPGA and neural cores, thank you very much. And I like to change them later, to upgrade gradually. Even buses.