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The End of an Athlon
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 1mo agoIs it ever fixable assuming one had unlimited money and wants to fix instead of rebuy?
- jdiff 1mo agoYou'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 1mo agoIf 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.
- throwaway173738 1mo agoYeah the cost of fixing it would get you the technology to make a new one.
- Zardoz84 1mo agonope
- dist-epoch 1mo agoMaybe, 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.
- moffkalast 1mo agoJust jam the piece back in there, I'm sure it'll be fine. /s
- nubinetwork 1mo agoYou could change the chip on the substrate, but why, you could just get another cpu...
- Aurornis 1mo agoHardcore 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 1mo agoThe 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 1mo agoInterestingly, 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.
- 3453f4f 1mo agoThere are three good pieces of history for you to look at. First, the NexGen Nx686 prototype... that became the K6 after AMD bought NexGen. https://web.archive.org/web/19990901212245/http://www.sandpile.org/impl/nx6.htm https://web.archive.org/web/19990901212245/http://www.sandpi... https://web.archive.org/web/20000831030211/http://www.sandpile.org/impl/pics/nexgen/nx6/nx6a_top.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20000831030211/http://www.sandpi... https://web.archive.org/web/20000831030227/http://www.sandpile.org/impl/pics/nexgen/nx6/nx6b_top.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20000831030227/http://www.sandpi... Second, the AMD K6 prototype... which came in a small footprint ceramic package. https://www.cpushack.com/chippics/AMD/K6/AMDK6-Processor-CA-ES.html https://www.cpushack.com/chippics/AMD/K6/AMDK6-Processor-CA-... Third, the AMD K7... which also came in that small footprint ceramic package, on a Slot A PCB, with L2 cache chips. http://www.cpu-galerie.de/html/amdk7athlonslot.html http://www.cpu-galerie.de/html/amdk7athlonslot.html Enjoy!
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- anonymousiam 1mo agoI'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.
- walrus01 1mo agothe 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.
- anonymousiam 1mo agoA month ago, I ordered one from a local vendor who mostly sells parts for old electronic gaming hardware. They substituted a similar 40mm fan, but the one they gave me didn't include a heat sink, or attach to the old heat sink boat, had fewer blades, and spun in the opposite direction. It was only $15 so I didn't bother to return it. I saw some others online that looked promising, but with a very long (October) lead time. Still looking.
- Torkel 1mo agoIs 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.
- Ekaros 1mo agoI 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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- formerly_proven 1mo agoNo, 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.
- moffkalast 1mo agoThere was just this video [0] yesterday showing the whole process for a GaN LED, it's fascinating how crude the post processing can be in contrast with the ultra precise etching and layering. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHyoz8fFpUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHyoz8fFpUM
- keyringlight 1mo agoOn 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. [0] https://youtu.be/ljZt_TQegHE?t=120 https://youtu.be/ljZt_TQegHE?t=120
- avazhi 1mo agoWe need those microscope guys to take some shots of this.
- M95D 1mo agoI 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.
- nubinetwork 1mo agoHeat probably cracked it. I had a xp2000+ and even with a heavy copper heatsink and a 9000rpm delta fan, the thing still ran hot.
- NikolaNovak 1mo ago9000rpm?? And I thought my alpha pal 6035 was a screamer! I think it did 6500-7000rpm though I could be wrong. How did it sound? :)
- nubinetwork 1mo agoLoud. Not my video, but the pitch sounds about right... https://youtu.be/-BeTVOgVkAA https://youtu.be/-BeTVOgVkAA
- theandrewbailey 1mo agoThe 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.
- bdavbdav 1mo agoWas that the ol’ pencil mod?
- theandrewbailey 1mo agoNo. AMD was taking 3200+ chips and binning/selling them as 2500+ chips. All it took was increasing the FSB speed in the BIOS, and a bit of luck from the silicon lottery. No hardware mods.
- cdmckay 1mo agoReminds of me of the Celeron 300A to 450 overclock.
- lightedman 1mo agoI took that old Celeron further and managed 533 stable with a screaming delta fan and a component swap on the mobo, beefier VRMs. Slap on a 256K stick of Winbond cache and boy did that thing scream for its time.
- jnpnj 1mo agoEven 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.
- unethical_ban 1mo agoMy 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.
- c0l0 1mo agoOuch, that poor die :( I remember it well, back in the very early 2000s, when my own Athlon XP 1800+ (an AGOIA stepping, I do know that for sure :D) met its untimely end at the hands of a device that was designed to prevent the exact misfortune that killed its sister CPU as seen in this submission! The fragile silicon was a problem the enthusiast/PC-builder community was very aware of, and the market responded with "spacer" kits you could buy for a few $$$ that were cut from solid sheets of thin copper. These spacers would carefully wrap around all the little bumps on the CPU's upper side, and provide a level plane for the heatsink to rest upon, while still establishing direct contact with the die that it was supposed to cool down. So there was, in theory, decidedly less of a chance of killing your CPU by having the heatsink meet it in an unfortunate angle, or something to that effect. Unfortunately, the spacer that I had bought turned out to be just a wee little bit too thick, and, despite thermal paste (Arctic Silver!), the CPU did not in fact make contact with the heatsink (something shiny from Thermalright or Zalman, I think?) at all, which killed it instantly as soon as I powered up the rig for the first time. That's what it was like back in the days, when we got to school walking ten miles uphill (both ways) barefoot in deep snow. I had to put in some overtime at the small PC shop I worked after school back then, to afford a measly Duron 800 as its replacement. And still they keep claiming that time heals all wounds... ;)
- Bluecobra 1mo agoI accidentally bent some of the pins on mine but I was able to carefully bend them back and luckily it booted. Computer building on those days was much more unfriendly. I remember hearing tons of horror stories of water cooling including leaks and the cpu overheating and dying that kept me far away from it until more recently.
- josephg 1mo ago> Computer building on those days was much more unfriendly. Has it? CPUs ran much cooler back then. And gpus didn’t need brackets and special power cables and all that. Water cooling was harder. But also way less common or necessary.
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- jamesforestwest 1mo agoOh 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...
- timcobb 1mo agoThis 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.
- pjmlp 1mo agoPoor CPU. My last desktop multimedia PC was powered by Athlon XP.
- logicallee 1mo agoWhy 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?
- inigyou 1mo agoCooling by pumping water through silicon is an interesting idea. You should invent that.
- logicallee 1mo agoThanks for the encouragement, but this has already been invented. Microsoft announced it in September 2025 here: https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/innovation/microfluidics-liquid-cooling-ai-chips/ https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/innovation/microf... (The article date is included in the source code and referenced elsewhere on the Internet at that time.)
- RetroTechie 1mo agoDIP and PGA packages for the win!
- lazyweb 1mo agoSocket 370 and Socket A were very easy to break. You needed a flat head screwdriver to pry off the metal bracket which held the cooler in place. Apply a little too much force (or just repeat the process a few times) and watch the plastic nook break off of the socket, rendering the entire mainboard useless. Zip-ties or super glue might save you, if just for a while. But good luck moving/transporting the computer then.
- rasz 1mo agoDont forget the fun when screwdriver slipped and gouged delicate CPU data lines near the socket.
- to11mtm 1mo agoI always did appreciate the 'nicer' heatsinks that spent the extra bit of cost of materials/machining/etc to provide a proper, safe 'slot' for the screwdriver. That said, my Socket A system that would move around alot between home/work/school... After the horrors I had seen at work and a particularly unlucky guy at college [0] I made sure that the board I got had the 4 hole setup option (GA-7DXR, awesome board except for the capacitor plague being a thing), and managed to get Alpha Novatech to sell me a discounted (for evaluation) PAL8045 cooler. For it's era, probably the most durable setup you could have for a Socket A, even though we didn't have Case mounting holes for thermal solutions yet. It also didn't have the torquing risks you would occasionally see on the P4's cam lever setup with cheaper boards. [0] - Guy tried installing a fancy dragon orb cooler, ground a corner off the CPU, the CPU became a board killer. (I still don't know why he tried another board after seeing the damage...)
- Waterluvian 1mo agoI'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.
- cogman10 1mo agoI'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.
- baddash 1mo agoAFLAC!?
- hno8a34nwn 1mo agoMore people should think like this
- emh68 1mo agoThe 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.