News Intel rumoured to restore soldered heatspreaders in Haswell-E

"smaller die sizes causing cracking of the solder" -> "Those issues appear to have been resolved in time for the Haswell-E enthusiast chip family".

Well, the solution is probably the fact, that S2011 cores in general are damn big .

 

By the looks of the picture it seem they may have switched to epoxy.

 

Looks like they ****ed that CPU when they de lidded it : /

 

Why would you think epoxy rather than straight solder?

Based on Toppc@coolaler's Ivy-Bridge-E leak back in the day (http://www.coolaler.com/showthread.php/305405), the epoxy around the die looks very similar (identical if you ask me, and I've seen my fair share of bare dies on laptop chips...) to the Haswell-E core, so one would think straight solder rather than metallic epoxy, no?

Mind you, Toppc seems to have used a heatgun of some sort to melt the solder rather than straight lid rip...

Interestingly though, that looks like the 12-core die rather than the expected 8core die.. someone tore up a Xeon 12-core perhaps?

 

That'll buff right out.

 

Nothing other than looking at the picture TBH, it just doesn't seem very solder'ie to me as it seems to lack the typical shine you would get from fresh solder. That and the way is looks around the edges of the die where it seems to me you can see the epoxy/solder in it's clean state and where it seems to have been pulled apart, to me it looks similar to an epoxy break than a solder break.

In the end it's pure guess work on my behalf though

 

That would be easily explained by the fact they seem to have ripped the die from the PCB it's mounted on. The evidence lies in the relative height of the epoxy residue. Aside from being fused to the lid using solder or some other form of molecular-level bonding, I don't see how you can get epoxy that's strong enough to rip the die right off the underside contacts....

I could be wrong, but judging by the epoxy breaking around the die solder-down location, the epoxy would have broken before the die got ripped out...

Also, pay attention to the very shiny "overflow" of what seems to be solder on the bottom edge of the die on the lid...

 

Epoxy is used in the aerospace industry so there is no doubt it can be very strong.
Either way, solder or epoxy should be a big improvement on the thermal grease they've used previously.
IDK how much difference thermally there is between the typically used solder and a good thermal epoxy.

 

the shine is reminiscent of a high silver content solder