implant 100 as known to those of ordinary skill such porous coated portions are necessary to promote bone ingrowth and achieve permanent fixation as explained above conventional porous coated surfaces suffer from poor fatigue resistance it has now been found however that the fatigue resistance can be markedly improved by creating one or more nodules on the surface of the implant and applying a porous coating only to the top surface of the nodules referring now to fig2 there is shown a greatly enlarged perspective view of a portion of the porous coated section 110 of an implant 100 made in accordance with the present invention the nodules 112 are essentially flat topped ridges that extend above the surface of the implant 110 in terms of the present invention a 34 nodule 34 is any structure that rises above the nominal surface of the implant for example the ridges illustrated in fig2 can be formed by machining 34 troughs 34 into the surface of an implant if an intersecting course of troughs are also cut a 34 checkered 34 pattern of lozenge shaped nodules will result as will be understood by those of ordinary skill the patterns of the nodules are limited only by the machining and surface forming techniques that are available for different types of implants different geometries will be found to be optimal the porous coating 114 illustrated as beads of material is applied only to the top surface 113 of the nodules 112 thus in terms of the present invention the surface of the implant is defined as all outer material of a device as currently designed and can include the material in recesses on for example the implant stem as well the fatigue resistance improvement provided by nodules of the present invention has been derived.