Ah, thanks! I had thought the B08/B09/B12/B20/… were all the same only with different ratings, and read one datasheet only.
I had to correct their number, it’s only twelve B08P03, six per side (of laptop, as well as of board).
I beg to differ. Here is a mainboard for sale where also the second chip I marked in the pic had been too hot. The seller has likely drawn a high current (to conclude from 64GB RAM included in the offer), possibly while charging the battery, through a left side USB port. When it failed, he tried the other left port, until it overheated, too. Is that correct, @Reese_Borel?
In this thread, where the port is mentioned, is is the left rear port, hence always the same chip. For the other ports and chips, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.
The backside B08P03 chips were found too hot, too, pointing to a right-hand port.
@Usernames: Can you confirm/debunk that this happened when the power went through a right side port?
FW seeks the root cause upstream, the diagnosis went from FW to mainboard manufacturer to chip manufacturer.
To me the most likely the root cause is a (sub)batch of bad chips. Those chips would have come on the same reel, placed on the same board together, and die successively from too high currents, causing a variety of different symptoms: Black Screen Issue, intermittent contact with USB storage, thunderbolt not working, etc.
@TheTwistgibber: Has the real cause been found?