Intel’s fabrication plants can churn out hundreds of thousands of processor chips a day. But what does it take to handcraft a single 8-bit CPU and a computer? Give or take 18 months, about $1,000 and 1,253 pieces of wire.
posted by jim in austin on May 28, 2009 - 50 comments

Mythbusters and the Mona Lisa in Overdrive. In a demonstration at Nvidia's NVISION show, Jamie and Adam provide a graphic demonstration of the power of multicore processors vs. a single CPU.
posted by Dave Faris on Aug 28, 2008 - 44 comments

Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present : This list is not intended to be an exhaustive compilation of microprocessors, but rather a description of designs that are either unique, or representative designs typical of the period, not necessarily the first of their kind, or the best. It includes material from text books, magazine articles and papers, authoritative descriptions and half remembered folklore from obscure sources, as such, it has no bibliography or list of references. via Linkfilter. It gets a little technical at times, but it's interesting reading if you're into the guts of these fun little toys!
posted by starscream on Dec 28, 2004 - 4 comments

What happens when you take the heatsink off a running CPU? The people at tomshardware.com find out by trying to fry four different processors. They also produced this excellent little video of them pulling heatsinks off running computers. You don't have to be a geek to appreciate burning silicon. You'll need the divx codec to view the video
posted by skallas on Mar 18, 2003 - 23 comments

Athlon + DDR: Bert McComas is a very highly respected analyst of the CPU and memory industry, and I always read his articles with great interest.

Intel has announced that they don't expect the P4 to be a significant part of their business until late 2001. According to McComas, if they don't change that plan, AMD is going to eat them for lunch, because the P3 is no longer competitive. The performance/price ratio for the new AMD stuff has to be seen to be believed. I think Intel is in major trouble, because informal reports are that a 1.5GHz P4 is about the same power as a 900 MHz P3.[more>
posted by Steven Den Beste on Oct 31, 2000 - 4 comments

A while ago I posted about some guys who built a computer case out of a refrigerator the better to overclock their CPU. Those guys were wusses. REAL men use liquid nitrogen.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Oct 22, 2000 - 2 comments

What kind of company sells a dual-CPU machine when the second CPU can't be used? See attached quote.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Jul 25, 2000 - 11 comments

I've been thinking of making my own digital delay for several years, but I've been waiting for CPU prices to drop. Damned if Cirrus logic went and solved that with one chip.
posted by plinth on Apr 18, 2000 - 4 comments