Microchip catnip

Saturday’s visit to the Centre for Computing History for a talk with some of the GoldenEye development team gave me the opportunity to look around their exhibits. It’s a really wonderful place.

In the main exhibition space there is a bowl of microprocessors in front of some slices of silicon:

One of my friends is a complete microprocessor geek. I guessed that sending him the photo above would be like catnip. It turns out I was right. Within minutes, I got this response:

And here was the summary that followed:

1. Core ix (Arrandale, mobile variant of Westmere)
2. LGA775 desktop package, so anything from late Pentium 4, Pentium D, Core 2 Duo or Quad, or their Celeron variants.
3. Socket 939 AMD, either an Athlon 64 Sledgehammer, Clawhammer or Winchester. The giveaway is the gap in the middle away from the 4x key pins in the circumference.
4. One of my all time favourites, an AMD K6-2+ — “Sharptooth” — basically took the original Pentium (which topped out at 200MHz) socket to 600MHz, and even has 128KB of L2 cache on board.
5. An AMD opteron, probably one of the early dual or quad models. Can’t tell without the pinout or model.
6. 6.1 almost certainly a Pentium-3 Mobile
   6.2 hard to say. Definitely 286 era, but probably a Motorola like 10 [below]
7. Impossible to say from that angle.
8. Either a Pentium-MMX (166-233) or a Celeron Mendocino. Both used the same black OPGA flip chip design.
9. A 486, either from: AMD, Intel, Cyrix, SGS-Thomson or Texas Instruments
10. A Motorola 6800 or 68000

Bravo, my friend. 👏