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Posted by userbinator 16 hours ago

The End of an Athlon(www.os2museum.com)
173 points | 82 commentspage 2
8cvor6j844qw_d6 15 hours ago|
Is it ever fixable assuming one had unlimited money and wants to fix instead of rebuy?
jdiff 15 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.
nanolith 14 hours 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.

throwaway173738 6 hours ago||
Yeah the cost of fixing it would get you the technology to make a new one.
dist-epoch 14 hours 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.
nubinetwork 12 hours ago|||
You could change the chip on the substrate, but why, you could just get another cpu...
Zardoz84 14 hours ago|||
nope
moffkalast 13 hours ago||
Just jam the piece back in there, I'm sure it'll be fine. /s
nubinetwork 12 hours ago||
Heat 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 9 hours ago|
9000rpm?? 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 3 hours ago||
Loud. Not my video, but the pitch sounds about right... https://youtu.be/-BeTVOgVkAA
lazyweb 9 hours ago||
Socket 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.
to11mtm 5 hours ago||
I 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...)

rasz 7 hours ago||
Dont forget the fun when screwdriver slipped and gouged delicate CPU data lines near the socket.
hno8a34nwn 6 hours ago||
More people should think like this
pjmlp 10 hours ago||
Poor CPU.

My last desktop multimedia PC was powered by Athlon XP.

RetroTechie 9 hours ago||
DIP and PGA packages for the win!
baddash 7 hours ago||
AFLAC!?
avazhi 14 hours ago||
We need those microscope guys to take some shots of this.
logicallee 9 hours ago|
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?

inigyou 9 hours ago|
Cooling by pumping water through silicon is an interesting idea. You should invent that.
logicallee 3 hours ago||
Thanks for the encouragement, but this has already been invented. Microsoft announced it in September 2025 here:

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.)