Where is it????

Where are the actual transistors of a CPU? Are they actually a part of the die or are they somewhere within the harder core/materials? If they are actually a part of the die, I think the manufacturers are dumb in a way to put such so fragile piece of electronics at that location without adding some kind of protection.

Well, maybe that's the way they make money, to leave such so fragile electronics unprotected so it can be damaged more so customers can keep buying their CPUs. Won't that be considered some kind of fraudulent practice?

It will be interesting to hear from others.

I have no knowledge of where the transistors are, but it seems unlikely that AMD or Intel would deliberately design chips to be killed. Both are in the customer satisfaction business and killed chips don't encourage brand loyalty.

With reasonable handling, it is tough to kill a chip. We run them way beyond spec and they still work, so we're getting more than our money's worth. I'm sure, from an engineering point of view, that AMD and Intel are trying their hardest to make quality products as best they can, within the limits of current physics.

The transistors *are* in the die, and I would have to say that it is so exposed to aid in cooling. Older chips don't have an exposed die, cause they run quite a bit cooler. The 25Mhz 486 that I have doesn't even have a fan on it. But with the large amounts of heat produced by chips today, they had to expose the die so that it can be cooled as effiiciently as possible.

thats right

the flip-chip design is aimed at directly cooling the die.

i'm not quite sure how people actually manage to crack their dies... if you're careful, then you're not going to have problems. i've put some bl00dy insane force on some amd socket a procs to engage clips and have yet to crack one!