The End of an Athlon

When I was researching the messiness related to strange and poorly documented CPUID bits successful the Athlon MP and XP processors, I had to switch a batch of CPUs. This was uneventful successful astir cases… but only most.

When I removed the heatsink from 1 unlucky Athlon XP, the processor looked for illustration this:

A chunk of AMD Athlon silicon is conscionable gone

And this is what the heatsink looked like, pinch a portion of the CPU glued to it:

A portion of an Athlon CPU stuck to a heatsink

There are 2 absorbing things astir this. One is that the CPU worked conscionable good until a bully chunk of it came off. The different is that removing the heatsink did not request immoderate peculiarly excessive force, though immoderate heatsinks do person a inclination to get stuck on.

Based connected the style of the “extracted” portion of silicon, I fishy location was a comparatively agelong and consecutive micro-crack successful the silicon which did not noticeably effect the operation. But erstwhile unit was applied, the micro-crack gave way, and past a full large chunk of silicon came off.

A close-up of the damaged CPU

Notice really the right-hand broadside of the gouge successful the CPU is very straight, whereas the left-hand broadside shows emblematic fracture marks.

It is notable that astir 2000, some Intel and AMD utilized flip-chip PGA packaging successful an effort to supply amended cooling (something some companies struggled pinch arsenic the TDP of the processors quickly changeable past 50W and approached 70-80W).

Both companies, particularly Intel, gave up connected this type of packaging comparatively quickly. Intel only utilized it for immoderate PIII models and switched to lidded CPUs for the P4 line, arsenic good arsenic the PIII-S processors. AMD utilized flip-chip packaging for PGA Athlons but not for Opterons.

The exposed silicon was a small spot excessively vulnerable and required assemblers to instal heatsinks very very carefully—if installing a heatsink applied unit that was excessively uneven, the silicon would crack. Many vintage flip-chip CPUs person chipped corners, though that usually does not impact operation.

Processors pinch lidded packaging still provided very bully cooling, but compared to CPUs pinch exposed silicon they proved overmuch sturdier and acold little susceptible to mechanical damage. Especially Intel’s pin-less LGA processors are rather sturdy and not astatine each prone to mechanical damage, though the anemic spot simply moved to the motherboard socket instead.

This introduction was posted successful AMD, K7, PC hardware. Bookmark the permalink.