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All Computers Are
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| Over sized & colored to better show areas of the chip. The Intel Pentium 4 is about the size of your thumbnail and contains over 43-million transistors, and many thousands of exceedingly small wires. |
All computers, whither from the big names or home built, are assembled from components from various manufactures. No computer manufacture makes all their own parts; they buy them from sub-component manufactures.
Some component manufactures are better than others. Nearly all offer a range of quality/price. Usually, but not always, the price paid for a part is directly related to its quality, interoperability, and longevity. In order to stay in business, and offer components to the broadest market, even the best manufactures are forced to offer lesser or cheaper parts, as well as their top-of-the-line offerings. Some lesser or cheaper parts simply don't have the sub-nanosecond precision required for the proper operation of a modern computer.
Not everyone in an orchestra is equally skilled. One or two may be superb, most are average, and maybe one is having a bad day, or just not up to the work. One bad player in an orchestra is not a showstopper; it usually just means the difference between a good orchestra and one that makes your ears hurt. But one bad player, in your computer, can be a real showstopper.
Obviously, computers are designed to run on electricity, and electricity causes heat. A few degrees too warm or cold, or a fraction of a volt too high or low, can cause a marginal component to run just a tiny amount too fast or slow.
Like a minimum wage musician, lower cost computer parts are not as good as the better parts at keeping a beat. How would an orchestra sound if it only hired the cheapest musicians? Then made them play in an overheated, or freezing auditorium? Then either starved them, or fed them ten cups of strong coffee just before the show?
By far the most common failure mode of a modern integrated circuit is aluminum migration. The small aluminum wires of a chip are arranged in parallel rows very close to each other. Heat, electricity and time, can cause the aluminum of one wire to slowly flow across the gap between the wires, and eventually short out the chip. Most quality chips are designed to minimize this migration, and usually will run for decades before they short out, but many things can speed this failure process. Cheaper parts, excessive heat, marginal circuit design, or bad handling, can cause the premature death of a chip through aluminum migration.
| ESD Damage | |
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| The above is an electron-microscopic picture of one of 43-million transistors in the Intel Pentium 4 computer chip. Each transistor is smaller than a microbe. (And getting smaller each new generation.) One small touch from the finger of a careless person can damage or destroy hundreds of these microscopic transistors in an instant. |
1. If your machine was factory built:
The AMD CPU indicates the manufacture was trying to build a low cost machine, and probably selected all the other parts based on price, not on quality.
2. If your machine was home-built:
Proper care may not have been taken to guard against ESD. Electro-Static-Discharge can weaken or prematurely age some of the components, which can cause problems after a few weeks, months, or years.Proper care may not have been taken to guard against ESD. Electro-Static-Discharge can weaken or prematurely age some of the components, which can cause problems after a few weeks, months, or years.
3. Over-Clocking:
Over-Clocking is running a computer faster than it was designed for. A little like Hot-Roding an automobile, it will go faster but things will break more often.Over-clocking requires that the internal voltages be raised a little in order to support the faster speeds. Higher voltages and faster speeds cause more heat inside all the computer's chips. The higher heat & voltage greatly exacerbates aluminum migration. Aluminum migration causes all manner of intermittent failures.
And, of course, running the chips faster than designed requires tighter timing. All modern chips are manufactured to meet a specific timing specification, but it is impossible to make all chips exactly the same. Some fall slightly on the faster side of the specification, while others are a few percent slower. As the chips are run faster and faster the slight timing differences start to become very important.
Due to the higher than acceptable failure rate of most AMD based computers, we can no longer accept them in our laboratory.
Due in part to aluminum migration, and other things, we have found that many AMD based computers, after we have repaired one problem, simply fail again due to some other problem.
We would rather not have you as a customer, than have an upset customer.
Thank you for your understanding in this matter.
No mass-produced computers. We hand-craft each of our computer systems.
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Copyright © 2000 -2006, J.R. Whipple & Associates
