Your comment reminded me of my K6 (or was it a K7) based PC I had assembled as a high schooler of modest means.

My goto testing protocol was to recompile the Linux kernel and make GNU chess play itself at the highest settings.

I was quite disheartened to find that my rig would crash out repeatedly. Not a single successful compilation of the kernel. Then on a whim I removed the case and pointed my table fan at it. Voila, everything worked.

I had planned to get some more thermal paste and redo the thermals and put the case back. But I never did.

Then one day the dialer of my landline got fried by a thunderstorm. No problem I used to dial using my modem and my skeletonic linux box.

Great setup when the money is tight. Good times.

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.

Even as a naive teen, I always found the mechanical forces required to clamp cpu heatsinks and fans brutally high considering the small ceramic package underneath.

Was that the ol’ pencil mod?

Chips are made from silicon wafers that are ~0.8mm thick. The transistor layer is built on one side of the wafer (because the transistors need to be built from epitaxial silicon, that is, where all the atoms are neatly arranged, and you cannot deposit a perfect epitaxial layer). Then the metal layers are built on top, by depositing copper and dielectric (traditionally silicon dioxide, that is, glass, but these days some more exotic stuff is used too).

Then that chip is flipped around, so the transistors and metal layers face the pcb. Most of the chip on the upside is just bulk silicon, and there for structural and heat spreading purposes, it's not needed for operation.

When chips are built out of multiple stacked layers, typically they thin the chips that go below and leave a thick bulk layer on the topmost one. IIRC, for some AMD chips they needed to use a separate, unprocessed bulk heat spreader layer for bonding reasons.

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.

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

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'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.

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

nope

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