The End of an Athlon(www.os2museum.com)
68 pointsby userbinator3 hours ago5 comments
  • Aurornis2 hours ago
    Hardcore builders will remove the lid of their CPU to get the best possible thermal contact. The performance improvement is very small and not worth it but the bragging rights are fun. Unless you destroy the chip while delidding it, that is.
    • jdiff2 hours ago
      The article mentions this, but this was before CPUs had lids. When delidding a CPU, you have to be very careful not to crack the silicon die that you are applying force directly to. In the case of this Athlon, even care wasn't enough.
      • polpoan hour ago
        Interestingly, AMD's previous gen processors, the K6/K6-2/K6-III, were all lidded flip chips. A delidded K6-era CPU looks remarkably similar to the early Athlons which did away with the lid.
  • Torkel33 minutes ago
    Is that actually the silicon that's on top of a cpu?

    I've always assumed the silicon is super thin - "wafer" thin. And then some material is added where the bonding wires etc are embedded in and the pads or pins are attached to.

    For sure it's like this on newer CPUs, where there is not a single piece of silicon bit rather multiple ones with interconnect between them.

    • Ekaros29 minutes ago
      I would guess that the effective layers are super thin. But such super thin parts do not have much structural integrity. So you leave material under it so that you can handle it. And then just drill to those parts as needed.
      • Torkel26 minutes ago
        TIL!

        I talked to codex a bit about it, and it claims that on the athlons it is indeed "bulk silicon" that's right there against the heat sink.

    • formerly_proven7 minutes ago
      No, that’s the die sawed out of a wafer. Those are wafer-thin, i.e. about 0.8mm. On some newer CPUs the wafer is ground down to improve thermals. In normal C4 packaging like here the active layer is sandwiched between the metal layers (which sit on the interposer PCB) and the bulk silicon (95% of the thickness upwards, to the camera). Silicon is not a great heat conductor.
  • anonymousiam41 minutes ago
    I've got one sitting next to me that I'm in the process of rejuvenating. The north bridge has a small fan with integrated heatsink/boat that I'm searching for. The CPU fan is still okay. It's a pre-PCIe system, and has a VGA output (no DVI or HDMI).

    The main reason I'm keeping it around is that it's got 5-1/4" & 3-1/2" floppy drives, and T1000 and DDR4 tape drives.

    • walrus0114 minutes ago
      the fan is likely a 12vdc 40x40mm, relatively shallow one (not very high airflow and not loud) one so you should be able to get a replacement from mouser or digikey. it's basically the same thing as a 80mm case fan from the same era scaled down.
  • 8cvor6j844qw_d62 hours ago
    Is it ever fixable assuming one had unlimited money and wants to fix instead of rebuy?
    • jdiff2 hours ago
      You'd need unlimited money and hyperadvanced future technology. There's just no way to get things lined up and no way to reconnect any of it and no way to reclaim or reattach any of the tiny bits of silicon that preferred to become dust rather than take sides.
    • nanolithan hour ago
      If you had enough money to convince AMD to sell you the tapeout, and if you could hire a fab using a similar process, you could make a new CPU. Other than that... probably not.

      The next best thing would be buying a replacement.

    • dist-epochan hour ago
      Maybe, you would have to buy AMD or make them sell you the schema/chip masks for this chip, then buy ASML and ask them to spend the next 10 years figuring out how to regrow silicon on the broken chip layer by layer while also re-exposing the missing part. You would probably also need to buy a chunk of TSMC since this would require advanced chemical processing such that you can re-grow and re-expose a part of the chip without destroying the existing part. You would also need a lot of investment in scanning technology, to measure exactly what the current state of the chip is and what needs rebuilding and where.
    • Zardoz84an hour ago
      nope
  • avazhi27 minutes ago
    We need those microscope guys to take some shots of this.