Why are CPU pins so fragile and why haven’t they been designed to make the pins hard to deform?
In: Technology
Are CPU hard to install? I always hear you have to be careful and not drop it & align with the yellow triangle, I’m building my jawn Saturday or Friday night
OP doesn’t remember Slot1 cpus (pentium II era) that basically used a slot similar to a PCI/Video slot and the CPU itself was housed in something very similar to a modern video card. Obviously it wasn’t very successful and better/cheaper ways have been invented since.
They want to have everything as close together as possible which reduces the time that electricity needs to go from point a to point b, speeding up the processing of the chip. It also reduces the amount of power needed by a bit, but speed is the primary concern.
At some point the fragility of the pins and components are worth the cost to have higher speed/lower power chips
Intel moved them to the motherboard which is why 95/100 posts about bent pins comes from AMD users
Because they are small. Small things are typically easy to bend. And typically the risk of damaging them is pretty low as you will usually just remove it from the packaging slotted into the CPU slot and lower a lever and you’re done
The chance to bend pins accidentally is pretty minimal unless you just straight up like drop it or something and it is somewhat possible to straighten the pins yourself just a bit time-consuming and frustrating
On top of having hundreds of small pins in one socket, one very important factor is pins are designed like springs to have an specific amount of contact force on the chip, to enable the chip to contact all the pins; this makes the pins more fragile.
If they’d give just one of the geniuses who designs the architecture inside of chips a few hours to design kind of architecture you’re talking about, things would get monumentally better almost instantly.
CPU pins are fragile outside of a transport case or a motherboard socket. In general, a CPU will spend very little time in those conditions, and when it is will be handled carefully. When in a case or installed properly a CPU is very durable, and physical damage to one is very, very unlikely.
Why not make them more durable? Because a CPU has to be very small and have a lot of contacts or pins in a very small space, so they have to be small. While fragile, a CPU is generally durable enough to allow it to be installed and handled safely as long as you are careful.
In my experience they are pretty tough. I’ve stepped on a CPU and re-straightened all the pins. And 99.99999999% of the time they are sitting in a socket. Why make them stronger?
There used to be [CPU’s that looked like SNES cartridges](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_1). There’s probably far too many pins on them these days to do something like that. Mounting the CPU that way made cooling a little trickier too.
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