5 Nov
2010
5 Nov
'10
6:10 a.m.
On Friday, November 05, 2010, Eric Smith wrote:
Teo Zenios wrote:
I don't believe that it was anywhere near 1.1 grams; in fact I
believe that is wrong by more than an order of magnitude. There was
no reason to put that much gold into the thing, even when gold was
at 25% of its current price. It's not a matter of what would have
bankrupted Intel; if the cost of using gold in the package had been
$10, they probably could have found a less expensive package, such
as kovar/nickel.
A few years ago, a scrapper would give me just over $6 per PPro in qty
1, so either he was an idiot (less likely), or there's something to
this.
Don't forget to include the bond-out wires, the fact that there's two
pieces of silicon that need to be interconnected, and the gold plating
on pins.
Pat
--
Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/
The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org
From the
wiki:
"Some models of Pentium Pro chips contain as much as 1.1 grams of
Gold. Because gold's price has increased more than 500% since 1995,
the price of the gold in one of these chips has gone from $8.25 to
close to $45 per chip."
Which models I don't know. Original price per chip must have been
over $1000, so $10 in gold would not have bankrupted Intel.