11 ms·

Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. How many dead xboxes

Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. How many dead xboxes and PlayStations have chips in them that are still good? I'm thinking of a reverse pick and place machine that pulls chips of boards (boards that can not be used to fix other dead devices) and is able to test each valuable component for later reuse.

Nextgrid 6y ago
It's technically possible for sure, but I would be surprised if the total cost of such a process was worth it compared to buying new chips in bulk.
xxs 6y ago
>How many dead xboxes and PlayStations have chips in them that are still good? Those things have one big APU (with weak CPU cores), some VRM and memory, GDDR5 + useless DDR3. I'd discount the APU as it'd need someone to make OS support for with the blessing of Sony/Microsoft. That leaves the chips of GDDR5, which can be used by low end GPUs - I don't think they'd ever recoup and investment and likely cheap manual labor of preheat + hot air is the easier option. No idea if anyone would get a license from AMD or NVidia for such GPU. Edit: the capacitors would have the best value but well... I cant see anyone relying on old caps for anything but repair.
- eptcyka 6y ago
  You can buy a motherboard with the xbone apu in China and run windows 10 on it. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16336/installing-windows-on-an-xbox-one-s-apu-the-chuwi-aerobox-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/16336/installing-windows-on-a...
baybal2 6y ago
> Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. This is already been happening for decades on industrial scale in countries doing eWaste recycling. Just a decade ago, you could've still find people selling refurbished chips in Shenzhen on every corner. Now it kinds of became a much more low profile enterprise. The US defence department, colloquially known as the pentagon, ran a wargame scenario a few years ago to see what will happen if US will be hit with a worst case scenario, years long semiconductor unavailability due to sabotage of domestic fabs, massive industry wide cyberattack, or something happening to Taiwan. One of comissioned think tanks recommended that exact methods of military going door-to-door to gather old gaming console, smartphones, and PCs for conversion to use in munitions, and military equipment.
- athrowaway3z 6y ago
  I can kinda see the value of getting a million PS3 cpus for in your new drone swarm or industry controllers. But how is gathering generic decades old hardware going to help? For Computation as a service its not that valuable or easy to install. And for reuse in 'new' devices it's even more questionable. All this stuff barely just works in this specific configuration.
  - chefkoch 6y ago
    Military equipment is often more than a decade old and uses far older electronics.
  - blagie 6y ago
    I'm only doing a few things on machine with around 32GHz worth of processing power (# of processors * GHz) that I couldn't do on my 80486 running 33MHz with a few MB of RAM. Emacs starts up a little bit faster. Pages in Chrome are more interactive than in Lynx, Mosaic, or Netscape. My word processor fits more text. On the whole, that 1000x increase in performance mostly bought the ability to have most of the code that runs be interpreted or JITed rather than statically compiled, to play videos, to do some heavy numerics and graphics (including things like family photos and videos), and so on. It's hard to think of anything I really /need/ in a life-or-death sense or an economic-survival sense that couldn't be done on older hardware with appropriate software. There's a ton of things I want, that help, or where migrations would be massive projects. If computers were to entirely disappear, and I couldn't automate things, communicate digitally (emails, messaging), word process, write code, I think that'd be a major systemic-collapse-level implosion of society. A lot of people would simply die. On the other hand, if computers were to regress to 33MHz-level performance, Youtube isn't sticking around, but we'd likely adapt as a society with some structural change, but without such a collapse.
    - ekianjo 6y ago
      > Youtube isn't sticking around As an end user it would be manageable but dont forget that the whole world runs on servers and many Industries would collapse if computing power is gone
postingawayonhn 6y ago
What would you put them in? Everyone wants the latest and greatest Playstation or Xbox with the fastest chips.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  If latest chips were unavailable (war, civilisation collapse), we'd do just fine with existing chips for decades or maybe even centuries. With clever software, you can eek much more real world use out of hardware. For example, your PS3 is probably sitting with its CPU idle right now, when it could be doing useful computations for someone else who needs more computing power.
  - swiley 6y ago
    You don't have to be clever (unless you're talking about video games), just not completely reckless.
  - KMag 6y ago
    > existing chips for decades or maybe even centuries. Chips experience solid-state diffusion, so I'd expect the expected survival probability of chips (ignoring any infant mortality effects) to go something like feature_size / sqrt( time ). If this is true, then I'd guess modern process nodes would have very low survival rates out at 100 years. Though, it's been over 20 years since I had any solid state chemistry, and most of my experience with diffusion modeling is in financial models, so take my wild guess with a grain of salt.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      But the failure rate in observed time for non-nand components is very very low. Take a 5 year old phone, and the chances of the main board being bad might be 10%... But the chances of the main CPU being bad is probably under 0.1%. The other 99% of failures are mostly water damage, physical damage, bad soldering, fatigue failure, bad nand, etc. Maybe they'll all fail at once, but I somehow doubt it. IC's from the 1970's are still going strong, also with a low failure rate.
IshKebab 6y ago
Completely pie-in-the-sky. Chips aren't fungible.
- rasz 6y ago
  Yet here we are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNje63vx73s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNje63vx73s Chinese "Motherboard" made using salvaged VRMs and transistors, salvaged capacitors, salvaged Intel Chipset!, and made to work with retired Intel Xeons and older DDR3 ECC memory.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Yeah, we would have to assume a post-fab apocalypse where we dig out electronics from a landfill for it to be economically viable.
throwaway4good 6y ago
Kettle chips are really good and made in the UK.
- alexgray1415 6y ago
  Get out!
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    Serious answer: Reusing old components makes no sense as the changes in technology are too big (say from a PS3 which has 45nm chip to a 7nm PS5 cpu). However you can keep using your playstation for longer as the new one will be more expensive or harder to get.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  NEW 5nm Kettle Chips! I'd buy some.
LatteLazy 6y ago
Moores law rules this out. A PS3 only has 256mb of ram, so you need to get it out of the case, remove it from the board, check it still works, package it up and sell it. But I can buy 2GB for 5 GBP. Can you do all the aforementioned things for less than that? I wonder if we could sort and melt down chips as a source of raw semiconductors (I hear rare earth metal mining/refining is very dirty). Maybe that would be economic?
kingosticks 6y ago
Aren't these BGAs? Safely removing and then also re-balling large non-socketed chips is tricky. Do they actually have machines for this? I understand that the re-work house we use do it by hand and also spend a chunk of time inspecting the chip once removed since it's very easily damaged. Maybe there are more automated places doing this on a mass scale, we don't do it very often which might explain the general poor results. This video is pretty cool showing the process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIPO4Q9k1Zo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIPO4Q9k1Zo
- monocasa 6y ago
  It's tricky to do on a one off case, but once you get the profiles down it's very automatable.
zitterbewegung 6y ago
I bought a Tesla T4 on eBay. Many people will buy a set of broken laptops and use the parts to make a fixed one like Like Miami. Louis Rossman constantly has to find donor boards to fix laptops.
monocasa 6y ago
Xboxes and PlayStations have cryptographic chains of trust going back to their on die boot ROM. You can't just pull it out and use it on another Xbox or PlayStation, much less use them for generic computation. I think the Xbox One is the first console to have no unsigned code execution at all during it's lifetime.
- qball 6y ago
  You can trivially run whatever code you wanted to if you seized the signing keys; I suspect that in such a "collect all the general-purpose computers for general-purpose computing things" that would be the first order of business. Not that the government doesn't already have copies, of course.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    I guess I didn't read a .gov mandate in what the parent was suggesting.

Nextgrid 6y ago

It's technically possible for sure, but I would be surprised if the total cost of such a process was worth it compared to buying new chips in bulk.

xxs 6y ago

>How many dead xboxes and PlayStations have chips in them that are still good? Those things have one big APU (with weak CPU cores), some VRM and memory, GDDR5 + useless DDR3. I'd discount the APU as it'd need someone to make OS support for with the blessing of Sony/Microsoft. That leaves the chips of GDDR5, which can be used by low end GPUs - I don't think they'd ever recoup and investment and likely cheap manual labor of preheat + hot air is the easier option. No idea if anyone would get a license from AMD or NVidia for such GPU. Edit: the capacitors would have the best value but well... I cant see anyone relying on old caps for anything but repair.

eptcyka 6y ago
You can buy a motherboard with the xbone apu in China and run windows 10 on it. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16336/installing-windows-on-an-xbox-one-s-apu-the-chuwi-aerobox-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/16336/installing-windows-on-a...

baybal2 6y ago

> Maybe we should start pulling chips of trashed electronics. There must be hundreds of thousands decently fast chips going into our trash. This is already been happening for decades on industrial scale in countries doing eWaste recycling. Just a decade ago, you could've still find people selling refurbished chips in Shenzhen on every corner. Now it kinds of became a much more low profile enterprise. The US defence department, colloquially known as the pentagon, ran a wargame scenario a few years ago to see what will happen if US will be hit with a worst case scenario, years long semiconductor unavailability due to sabotage of domestic fabs, massive industry wide cyberattack, or something happening to Taiwan. One of comissioned think tanks recommended that exact methods of military going door-to-door to gather old gaming console, smartphones, and PCs for conversion to use in munitions, and military equipment.

athrowaway3z 6y ago
I can kinda see the value of getting a million PS3 cpus for in your new drone swarm or industry controllers. But how is gathering generic decades old hardware going to help? For Computation as a service its not that valuable or easy to install. And for reuse in 'new' devices it's even more questionable. All this stuff barely just works in this specific configuration.
- chefkoch 6y ago
  Military equipment is often more than a decade old and uses far older electronics.
- blagie 6y ago
  I'm only doing a few things on machine with around 32GHz worth of processing power (# of processors * GHz) that I couldn't do on my 80486 running 33MHz with a few MB of RAM. Emacs starts up a little bit faster. Pages in Chrome are more interactive than in Lynx, Mosaic, or Netscape. My word processor fits more text. On the whole, that 1000x increase in performance mostly bought the ability to have most of the code that runs be interpreted or JITed rather than statically compiled, to play videos, to do some heavy numerics and graphics (including things like family photos and videos), and so on. It's hard to think of anything I really /need/ in a life-or-death sense or an economic-survival sense that couldn't be done on older hardware with appropriate software. There's a ton of things I want, that help, or where migrations would be massive projects. If computers were to entirely disappear, and I couldn't automate things, communicate digitally (emails, messaging), word process, write code, I think that'd be a major systemic-collapse-level implosion of society. A lot of people would simply die. On the other hand, if computers were to regress to 33MHz-level performance, Youtube isn't sticking around, but we'd likely adapt as a society with some structural change, but without such a collapse.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    > Youtube isn't sticking around As an end user it would be manageable but dont forget that the whole world runs on servers and many Industries would collapse if computing power is gone

postingawayonhn 6y ago

What would you put them in? Everyone wants the latest and greatest Playstation or Xbox with the fastest chips.

londons_explore 6y ago
If latest chips were unavailable (war, civilisation collapse), we'd do just fine with existing chips for decades or maybe even centuries. With clever software, you can eek much more real world use out of hardware. For example, your PS3 is probably sitting with its CPU idle right now, when it could be doing useful computations for someone else who needs more computing power.
- swiley 6y ago
  You don't have to be clever (unless you're talking about video games), just not completely reckless.
- KMag 6y ago
  > existing chips for decades or maybe even centuries. Chips experience solid-state diffusion, so I'd expect the expected survival probability of chips (ignoring any infant mortality effects) to go something like feature_size / sqrt( time ). If this is true, then I'd guess modern process nodes would have very low survival rates out at 100 years. Though, it's been over 20 years since I had any solid state chemistry, and most of my experience with diffusion modeling is in financial models, so take my wild guess with a grain of salt.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    But the failure rate in observed time for non-nand components is very very low. Take a 5 year old phone, and the chances of the main board being bad might be 10%... But the chances of the main CPU being bad is probably under 0.1%. The other 99% of failures are mostly water damage, physical damage, bad soldering, fatigue failure, bad nand, etc. Maybe they'll all fail at once, but I somehow doubt it. IC's from the 1970's are still going strong, also with a low failure rate.

IshKebab 6y ago

Completely pie-in-the-sky. Chips aren't fungible.

rasz 6y ago
Yet here we are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNje63vx73s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNje63vx73s Chinese "Motherboard" made using salvaged VRMs and transistors, salvaged capacitors, salvaged Intel Chipset!, and made to work with retired Intel Xeons and older DDR3 ECC memory.
imtringued 6y ago
Yeah, we would have to assume a post-fab apocalypse where we dig out electronics from a landfill for it to be economically viable.

throwaway4good 6y ago

Kettle chips are really good and made in the UK.

alexgray1415 6y ago
Get out!
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  Serious answer: Reusing old components makes no sense as the changes in technology are too big (say from a PS3 which has 45nm chip to a 7nm PS5 cpu). However you can keep using your playstation for longer as the new one will be more expensive or harder to get.
jonplackett 6y ago
NEW 5nm Kettle Chips! I'd buy some.

LatteLazy 6y ago

Moores law rules this out. A PS3 only has 256mb of ram, so you need to get it out of the case, remove it from the board, check it still works, package it up and sell it. But I can buy 2GB for 5 GBP. Can you do all the aforementioned things for less than that? I wonder if we could sort and melt down chips as a source of raw semiconductors (I hear rare earth metal mining/refining is very dirty). Maybe that would be economic?

kingosticks 6y ago

Aren't these BGAs? Safely removing and then also re-balling large non-socketed chips is tricky. Do they actually have machines for this? I understand that the re-work house we use do it by hand and also spend a chunk of time inspecting the chip once removed since it's very easily damaged. Maybe there are more automated places doing this on a mass scale, we don't do it very often which might explain the general poor results. This video is pretty cool showing the process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIPO4Q9k1Zo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIPO4Q9k1Zo

monocasa 6y ago
It's tricky to do on a one off case, but once you get the profiles down it's very automatable.

zitterbewegung 6y ago

I bought a Tesla T4 on eBay. Many people will buy a set of broken laptops and use the parts to make a fixed one like Like Miami. Louis Rossman constantly has to find donor boards to fix laptops.

monocasa 6y ago

Xboxes and PlayStations have cryptographic chains of trust going back to their on die boot ROM. You can't just pull it out and use it on another Xbox or PlayStation, much less use them for generic computation. I think the Xbox One is the first console to have no unsigned code execution at all during it's lifetime.

qball 6y ago
You can trivially run whatever code you wanted to if you seized the signing keys; I suspect that in such a "collect all the general-purpose computers for general-purpose computing things" that would be the first order of business. Not that the government doesn't already have copies, of course.
- monocasa 6y ago
  I guess I didn't read a .gov mandate in what the parent was suggesting.