A Pentium III Autopsy Using an Electron Microscope

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[citation][nom]amk-aka-phantom[/nom]This is interesting, but seeing a CPU being sawed... it somehow tortures me from the inside.Cool story. I've been looking for one of those for 2 years by now to stuff into my old PC instead of a Celeron... just for the hell of it. Can't get them in the store, no one has one to give away and don't want to deal with ebay. Out of luck, I guess.[/citation]

You could always go to garage sales, flea markets, or thrift stores. From one of those places, you may be able to pick up a whole, old pentium 3 tower for next to nothing. scavenge the parts and have spare stuff.
 
[citation][nom]Chicano[/nom]You havent been looking in the right places!!! I have a Coppermine (180 nm) 850MHz pc100/133 among my old stuff.. it's in perfect working order but I guess you want the 250nm 450mhz? Well those are still around in latinamerica at cheap prices... http://computacion.mercadolibre.co [...] ntium-iii/ Language barrier? click on google translate. I'm sure you could work something out with the seller and probably in english.. most people browsing the net these days understand some english and can communicate with you by any means if they have to...[/citation]

hahahahaha that was funny as hell. It may have not supposed to have been funny, but it was. I checked it out and laughed at 50.00 bucks for a pentium 3. Maybe it is a different currency.
 
250nm... That's incredible. I still have an old laptop with, get this, a pentium I. My smartphone is literally 8 times more powerful than that old laptop... lol
 
A year ago I bought a PIII 1,4GHz S for $20 to "upgrade" an old PC, and it runs serious apps fluently. And also youtube with Opera! :) Why is it such more powerful than Firefox and IE with the same plugin?

And I also frequently use a K3-400 embedded on a '97 PC. Fine emailing and word processing rig, still in use.

Until there is no serious mass recyclement of the PCs, I don't throw them away.
 
You don't need an electron microscope to see this!
I've seen similar pictures on a Pentium 90 CPU through a 500x amplified microscope,which was capable of going upto a 1000x magnification, and I could see things clearly through it!
 
[citation][nom]mikem_90[/nom]I'm pretty sure you can't. There is a limit with optical microscopes, one being that normal light's own wavelength is much wider than that. Intel had to deal with this when it was trying to shrink CPUs even smaller. They were wanting to etch smaller than typical visible light wavelengths. So they moved to UV, extreme UV... which have smaller wavelengths and thus a better resolution, all to get it smaller and smaller.[/citation]
The problem is that when you get near (let alone below) the wavelength of light (400 – 700 nm), you have big problems with diffraction (the light bending around the edge).

That article is about a year old. But thanks for reporting it anyway!
 
[citation][nom]amk-aka-phantom[/nom]Commander Keen was a GREAT game.Of course not. Some stores can be reasonable on old tech.[/citation]
Cosmo's cosmic adventure was better 😛
 
The (REALLLLLY) old high/low BIOS chips used in 8086 and 80286 boards have a little glass window you can peek through after removing a protective foil sticker (apparently UV or IR light would reset the volatile part of them).

They were made on such a massive scale compared to today's process tech that you can actually see the individual transistors with a good quality mid-range optical microscope.
 
[citation][nom]ProDigit10[/nom]You don't need an electron microscope to see this!I've seen similar pictures on a Pentium 90 CPU through a 500x amplified microscope,which was capable of going upto a 1000x magnification, and I could see things clearly through it![/citation]

If I am gathering what I have read and understand properly, you are likely seeing structures, but not individual transistor gates, which on the Pentium 90mhz were around .8 µm and on this coppermine chip (.18 µm), even harder to see. The smallest structures on the chips are beneath the resolving power of optical microscopes.

The solution is to not use regular light, but beams of electrons since you can overcome the theoretical diffraction limit of 200nm resolution (of some of the best optical microscopes).

Now try comparing that with today's Lithography of 32nm, or .032 µm.
 
[citation][nom]HMRkingpin[/nom]hahahahaha that was funny as hell. It may have not supposed to have been funny, but it was. I checked it out and laughed at 50.00 bucks for a pentium 3. Maybe it is a different currency.[/citation]

Yeah that's in Argentinean Pesos... At $4.20 to a dollar those $50.00 pesos sum-up the amount of $11.90 USD... And you'd laugh harder if I had searched in Colombian websites... $21,214.35 for a Pentium III... and that's cheap!!!
 
[citation][nom]Hellbound[/nom]I still have an 800mhz P3 that still works.[/citation]
I've got some old Slot 1 Celeron 300 and a 333 and a pair of P3 500's that worked on a dual CPU mobo, that was definitely the cats meow when that came out! Also an old Slot A AMD CPU!
 
[citation][nom]ithurtswhenipee[/nom]I love how clicking on the zoom link provides you with a picture that is about 3% larger.[/citation]
Actually if you click on it again (that is, click on the one that is 3% larger), yet another page opens up and that's about 2x larger than the 103% image. Not that it matters...why not just make the largest picture the default 'zoom' size image.
 
i am holding in my hand a celeron 700/128/66/1.7V... i keep it as a toy. it still works though. i also have an Intel Pentium A80502-133 133MHz. kool article.
 
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