The End of an Athlon

(os2museum.com)

58 points | by userbinator 2 hours ago

3 comments

  • anonymousiam 6 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.

  • Aurornis 1 hour 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.
    • jdiff 56 minutes 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.
      • polpo 33 minutes 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.
  • 8cvor6j844qw_d6 1 hour ago
    Is it ever fixable assuming one had unlimited money and wants to fix instead of rebuy?
    • jdiff 58 minutes 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.
    • nanolith 29 minutes 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-epoch 23 minutes 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.
    • Zardoz84 24 minutes ago
      nope