When I was researching the mess related to strange and poorly documented CPUID bits in the Athlon MP and XP processors , I had to swap a lot of CPUs. This was uneventful in most cases… but only most. When I removed the heatsink from one unlucky Athlon XP, the processor looked like this: A chunk of AMD Athlon silicon is just gone And this is what the heatsink looked like, with a piece of the CPU glued to it: A piece of an Athlon CPU stuck to a heatsink There are two interesting things about this. One is that the CPU worked just fine until a good chunk of it came off. The other is that removing the heatsink did not need any particularly excessive force, although some heatsinks do have a tendency to get stuck on. Based on the shape of the “extracted” piece of silicon, I suspect there was a relatively long and straight micro-crack in the silicon which did not noticeably impact the operation. But when force was applied, the micro-crack gave way, and then a whole big chunk of silicon came off.…