Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Oh man, the nostalgia. I had an Athlon XP too, and I still remember that fear when installing the heatsink. One wrong move and you're basically screwed...
- Why are chips still built in only a few layers?
Even modern silicon only has some 60 of them right?
Plus don't transformers work in layers, making it natural to put a bunch of layers on top of each other? Regarding cooling, couldn't there be liquid cooling through a plumbing network in the same die?
Our brain takes quite a large volume, and we want chips that have a similar level of parts count (achieved - 80 billion neurons) and interconnectedness (not yet, around 10k synapses per neuron). Why do it in 80 2D layers? Is there no way to etch silicon in 3D?
by logicallee - Cooling by pumping water through silicon is an interesting idea. You should invent that.by inigyou
- The first computer I bought with my own money was an Athlon XP. Probably got the motherboard and CPU from Comp USA or Office Max or something. I bought it specifically to play The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind! It felt like it was obsolete in a week, the way Moore's Law was rocking at that time.
And yeah, when I opened the box and saw that the CPU had a fragile ceramic/glass top like that, I had a mini panic attack.
These days, of course I have a few in my retro collection, but I'll never remove the heatsinks. The CPU and motherboards might as well be one unit, never to be separated again.
by emh68 - Is it ever fixable assuming one had unlimited money and wants to fix instead of rebuy?
- Just jam the piece back in there, I'm sure it'll be fine. /sby moffkalast
- nopeby Zardoz84
- You could change the chip on the substrate, but why, you could just get another cpu...by nubinetwork
- 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.by dist-epoch
- 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.
by nanolith - 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.by jdiff
- The first time I built a PC, and the first time I mounted a heatsink, was to one of these bare die AMD CPUs. I heard about the fragility of these, and must have read the directions about ten times, and paused and checked each step about five times while doing it. It came out fine, but it was nerve wracking as hell.
Overclocking an Athlon XP 2500+ to a 3200+ was pretty cool. Easiest overclock ever.
- Was that the ol’ pencil mod?by bdavbdav
- My first build was an AMD "Venice" 3000+. Stock 2.8 GHz, I think I got it to 3.4 GHz with a DFI LANParty! motherboard and 512MB of DDR-600. Second CPU was a Pentium D, the first Intel generation of dual-core. Stock 2.66 GHz, I got it to 3.6 GHz. Almost 1GHz of overclock! Prime95 stable!
It's nice that modern CPUs self-overclock well, and my 9850X3D is by far the best CPU I've ever owned. But I miss the tweaking days a little. Fun hobby.
This must be what petrol heads fear about EVs. Sure, they're simpler and less maintenance and healthier. But you can't overbore it, or add a turbo, or change the cams.
- Even as a naive teen, I always found the mechanical forces required to clamp cpu heatsinks and fans brutally high considering the small ceramic package underneath.by jnpnj
- 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.
by anonymousiam - 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.by walrus01
- This happened to me several times with Athlons in 2000, the die on these would break exceptionally easily such that it was a known issue at the time. You had to be quite careful.by timcobb
- I've been assembling my own desktop PCs since I was about 15, but I have never gotten comfortable with just how much pressure it takes to affix some heat sinks. I think it was my Thunderbird 1200 where you had to press a slotted-head screwdriver on the lever to force it down and under the clasp.by Waterluvian
- I'm pretty sure I had exactly that heat sink and man was the pressure crazy (Thermalright IIRC). I'm pretty sure my screwdriver slipped and gashed the board, luckily I didn't notice damage.by cogman10
- 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.
by Torkel - On the bottom [0], youtuber/cooling specialist/tuner der8auer did an interview with an intel engineer a few years ago. One of the points they bring up is that it's not a pure gain to have less silicon between the logic and the next interface to another material conducting heat away as the silicon itself acts as a conductor/spreader, i.e. sideways as well as upwards, so there's a balance.by keyringlight
- 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.
- 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.by Ekaros
- Chips are made from silicon wafers that are ~0.8mm thick. The transistor layer is built on one side of the wafer (because the transistors need to be built from epitaxial silicon, that is, where all the atoms are neatly arranged, and you cannot deposit a perfect epitaxial layer). Then the metal layers are built on top, by depositing copper and dielectric (traditionally silicon dioxide, that is, glass, but these days some more exotic stuff is used too).
Then that chip is flipped around, so the transistors and metal layers face the pcb. Most of the chip on the upside is just bulk silicon, and there for structural and heat spreading purposes, it's not needed for operation.
When chips are built out of multiple stacked layers, typically they thin the chips that go below and leave a thick bulk layer on the topmost one. IIRC, for some AMD chips they needed to use a separate, unprocessed bulk heat spreader layer for bonding reasons.
by Tuna-Fish - I learned (can't remember where) that I should try to rotate the cooler a little bit, with the mounting clamp still on, before undoing the clamp and removing it.
I still have a working Athlon XP / KT133A with ISA under my desk.
by M95D - 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.by Aurornis
- Flip-chip packaging is still common in laptops. Still a (albeit minor) risk if you're repasting an older laptop.by xattt
- The performance improvement can actually be pretty significant, depending on the exact setup of course. In my case I delidded 3 Intel CPUs a few years back (i9-9900k and similar vintages) and replaced the thermal paste under the lid with liquid metal (from Thermal Grizzly) and also used liquid metal between the outside of the lid and either a water cooler block or a heatsink and fan. I forget the exact figures but I wanna say idle and even maximum load temps were around 20 degrees cooler... and all 3 were max overclocked to 5GHz. In fact I still use all three as network storage servers now.by tambeb
- Your comment reminded me of my K6 (or was it a K7) based PC I had assembled as a high schooler of modest means.
My goto testing protocol was to recompile the Linux kernel and make GNU chess play itself at the highest settings.
I was quite disheartened to find that my rig would crash out repeatedly. Not a single successful compilation of the kernel. Then on a whim I removed the case and pointed my table fan at it. Voila, everything worked.
I had planned to get some more thermal paste and redo the thermals and put the case back. But I never did.
Then one day the dialer of my landline got fried by a thunderstorm. No problem I used to dial using my modem and my skeletonic linux box.
Great setup when the money is tight. Good times.
by srean