The End of an Athlon

The 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.

Flip-chip packaging is still common in laptops. Still a (albeit minor) risk if you're repasting an older laptop.

On 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

I 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.

No, 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.

the 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.

You could change the chip on the substrate, but why, you could just get another cpu...

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.

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.

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.

nope

Just jam the piece back in there, I'm sure it'll be fine. /s