EEVblog #1341 - AMAZING $250,000 IBM Processor TEARDOWN!

hi that's not a processor that's a processor this bad boy is 600 watts power dissipation 2772 pins is that a socket 2772 i guess it is it's got 121 dies installed it's 63 layers it's liquid cooled it's automatic it's systematic it's hard hydromatic ultramanic what could be grease lightning thank you very much jim renery for sending this into the mailbag i had to do a separate video for this it's so cool this is an ibm 9121 processor module which comes out of a system 390 slash es 9000 whatever you want to call it parallel uh enterprise server from 1991. this thing is a beast and we're going to tear it down so let's just toss this little pathetic thing away check it out there's the day code there now a second week 1991 i can't make heads of the tales of the part numbers on this but i do believe is an ibm 9129 processor out of a processor frame for a system 390 es 9000 server it went under different names it's kind of weird if anyone knows the exact like story behind that some people like they actually branded it system 390 other times they branded es9000 or something apparently and anyway this is a state-of-the-art mainframe processor from the early 90s oh and it's just look at it ah thing of beauty this is joy forever behold the wonka mobile thing of beauty is a joy forever we've got a gigantic ceramic substrate in here uh as i said 2772 pins on this bad boy in a gigantic metal frame that weighs 2.2 kilos just the just the processor module on each frame uh like a physical frame or try and find a photo or actually had uh two of these processor modules i believe back then like it was a big deal no i didn't just crush the pins because it has like little tabs on the bottom it's got like individually engraved numbers on it so i don't know they tested and would have tested like and maybe characterized each individual one back then and i found an old uh ad in a magazine back in the day that the ibm 9121 processor system uh went for up to one and a half million dollars i don't think that was this actual just this module it was probably only like a couple of hundred thousand dollars for this module so cheap as chips uh this is 1991 too uh none of this modern 2020 fiat currency rubbish now this has around 20 mips or 20 million instructions per second and as far as processors in the early 90s go we're talking like an 804 86 processor back then i believe that came out in 89 but basically that was still like the top of the range processor the highest speed version that i believe the 50 megahertz of the 804 rounded about double that it was about you know 40 million instructions are per second so this thing wasn't exactly stated out in terms of mips processing power compared to desktop pcs of the day but you've got to remember this is a massive mainframe processor system designed for huge amounts of data processing and other stuff and this could access up to nine gig of memory per processor that doesn't sound like a lot these days right nine giga memory but back in 1991 whoa this is heavy and of course heavy it is as i said this weighs 2.2 kilos just for the processor module itself and this package is actually called a tcm or a thermal conduction module because it actually came in two types obviously uh these pins the uh 2 72 pins on it they connected down to a matching socket in this thing but these processors actually had a huge heatsink on top of them that weighed like five kilos or something like that and i believe this came in like both air-cooled and water-cooled versions and here's a picture of what one of those would look like so there were as i said two of these modules per uh physical frame they called it uh which held the two processes and had all the wiring and other uh support stuff and the power supplies and the cooling infrastructure and things like that so yeah this thing could dissipate up to 600 watts there's a 121 chips or up to 121 chips and they can dissipate up to 10 watts each for a maximum module power dissipation of 600 watts so yeah this little piss ant thing so let's take this puppy apart first we get this frame off and check this out just notice this little uh tab on here i reckon that is for a thermocouple to measure the temperature of this thing most likely i'd be stunned if they weren't measuring the temperature of this thing look at all these screws to hold it down i believe it is uh oil filled inside like the entire substrate filled with oil and we'll see a whole bunch of heat sinks as well oh yep can crack it this could take a while yes i do have an electric screwdriver but not one that supports this tip i just uh unscrewed the last screw damn i didn't have the camera running and i heard this and like big o-ring seal in there i don't know oh can you i'm not sure if you can hear it hang on now i'm just deciding which is the best orientation to lift this up from oh i can see in the back i'm having a peek and i know that this will be the most impressive if i lift it up like this actually i have to cut along there so sorry for all you purists out there but we're going to avoid the avoid the warranty on this bad boy a million voices just cry out in [Laughter] cry out in anger all right here we go are we ready rolling camera because i only get one take at this i think wow look at that whoa that is gorgeous that is processor porn right there wow wow wow wow look at the individual copper heatsink slugs on each little chip inside there and yes there is a like a thin little layer of oil but uh it hasn't oozed out or anything you can see the o-ring seal around the edge there wow that's just brilliant yes they all have shifted they all should be nice evenly spaced but absolutely beautiful and you can see that they all go into individual little uh machined slots in here which by the way have little springs in them check that out there's actually little springs inside each one of those not all of them are populated there's some that actually don't have any uh heatsink slugs at all but yeah there's little little springs down in there to keep the pressure to keep the tension down on the uh the die and you'll notice there that some of them just don't have dies installed in them i don't know if that was like just an optional thing but it looks like like the pattern is there i'll show you a closer up later but uh yeah it looks like the the die pattern is there but uh anyway these are like um flip chips these are chip scale packages so they're it's like from 1991 whoa so you can see why this is called a tcm or thermal conduction module because it's all about the thermals it's all about getting the heat out of each individual die on there each individual chip and as i said each chip can dissipate up to 10 watts so one of these are copper solid copper slugs here even though they don't actually have direct contact uh to this except on the sides i guess their fit is if i can take oh yeah yeah yeah their fit is very very oh yeah hang on here we go here's one of these copper slugs and they just fit brilliantly and i can see the oil the bubble oozing out and look at that oh i could play with that all day oh that's just beautiful absolutely beautiful so yeah they don't have well the mineral oil is going to be uh heat conductive as well so you know it's like it's going to have an extra bit of thermal resistance in there but anyway that's how each one of those individual dyes can dissipate up to 10 watts with a maximum module dissipation of 600 watts it's just oh it's fantastic there's some of the pattern on an unpopulated chip look at that wow that's really something and i know you want to know how many viewers and what via hole sizes we've got on here we're talking 78 500 of them and they're 100 microns a pop now i'm actually going to get all of these heatsink slugs off here and i'm going to put them back over here so this could uh take a while and they do have like a little uh knobby bit on the top little nib on the top and that goes down into the spring just to center the spring on this thing so anyway um i'm going to stick them in and you know which ones actually which holes are populated because they've got springs in them um the ones that don't have springs i won't put a copper slug in there because it might be hard to get out geez a lot of a lot of suction on there you've really got to get them off at an angle and uh oh and will those springs yet the springs will self-realign so that's nice obviously the manufacturing process is not as messy as the disassembly process this is ridiculous what am i doing so i'm not sure what sort of mineral oil this is so what sort of oil seems some sort of mineral type oil in the seismic industry we used to use isopar or isopar m i think it was um so you can go look that one up and we had a license to use that with these gigantic tanks of it um just filled with because it used to uh we we had one tank that was filled with isopar that but that tank was wasn't just a tank it was like part of the manufacturing ah these slippery little suckers part of the manufacturing process where we would put the outer skin onto a seismic streamer and uh so the outer outer poly put the kettle on skin was uh oh gotta get the right way up it was um yeah like extruded kind of for want of a better term oh there's a little little something or other there a little um yeah it was like extruded out of this machine that was this big drum that was filled i'm talking bigger than a human size drum like seven foot eight foot tall or something and it was uh there would be extruded out of that and it was just filled with isopower and we'd have isopar all over the floor and it was just ah it was yeah fun stuff okay that one doesn't have a spring so i'm gonna give that one a miss it's only like four or five that don't have springs oh oh yeah yeah i've broken off are they like little bypass caps in there on the ceramics how would they like just come off like that there's a couple of them we'll have a look at those under the microscope but surely like i'm not putting much force on these at all so i'm not sure why they'd just they wouldn't just fall off like that unless there's some sort of like they're not actually soldered down they're just there's another one there's another one right there look at that cannot explain how unusually therapeutic this is yeah yeah i think i'm just breaking off all those little brown what look like caps but i don't know unless i get them under the microscope and no that's all correct i got them all in the same i got them all in the correct order one two three four five six unpopulated chippies and they didn't put the springs in and oh these are oh i don't wanna but ah this is just so much fun oh boy i wish this was feel a vision wow anyway yeah we've had some of these little chippy things come off like half a dozen of them so i'm not sure what the deal is i'm going to uh i'll just leave this gunked up and i'll just get some paper towels and wipe off all this because it'll be easier to see under the uh microscope and the macro lens um for the chip so i'll get back to you anyway that is the module in glorious 4k without the with still with the mineral oil on it and you'll notice that they're not all identical why aren't they all identical because these modules are supposed to contain uh sram chips as well 128 kbit sram chips and i'm guessing that these are down here why are they kind of like oddball um sort of not really you know symmetrically placed i don't know um but anyway like i assume that they're different types but even they're a different color slightly different color to those ones and i look that could just be light refraction of the dyes because well that's what dyes do pesky little things to look at and uh well quite beautiful actually get them under the right uh light and they're they're quite spectacular but uh yeah anyway this is not just one module with like 121 different processors on it it's got tons of different logic elements including 128 kbit s rams and that was that was pretty huge for 91 and their 10 nanosecond access time srams too actually it seems to be near impossible to just wipe this oil off yet yeah there's another one that yeah i can see the pads on the bottom of that chip so they're coming off so these are not soldered down i reckon these are just well are they just press fit wow that'd be interesting i don't even know soaking the whole thing in isopropyl do the job um because yeah that oil is going to be hard to get rid of well that's how you drop the frame out um i just put it up here so to raise it up just so that i can take some macro photo shots over always uh my tear downs always usually always have a high res tear down photos over on my flickr account so check that out um and this just and the whole thing just fell off so we're left with ceramic substrate which is pretty groovy though so anyway i'm really having some fun uh taking photos of all this at like different angles and stuff it really is just quite something and i can of course adjust the iris f 3.4 it's the lowest my camera will go at the zoom if i increase our aperture everything becomes in focus or mostly and let's check this out under the tagano now this is uh manufacturing material science at its absolute finest it's like absolutely phenomenal i'll link in the paper uh down below you can read it for yourself talking about all of the uh construction technology that goes into this but we're talking about a uh 63 layer ceramic substrate here as i said 121 devices on here 144 caps all in here we'll take a look at those each chip has 648 pads on it we'll check that out closer up a mix of cmos and bipolar technology devices by the way and there's 78 500 vias on this thing i mean it's just it's just absolutely incredible and each chip there has 648 pads and uh it's this is not a pcb okay this is a ceramic substrate with a mixture of uh thin film and thick film hybrid layer technology so i believe the top layer is uh thin film printed and the inner layers are thick film printed now those 63 layers 0.2 millimeters that's 7.8 foul thickness each uh we're talking about 12 micron conductors that's like half a thou half a thou conductors on this thing so yeah it's just it's just absolutely nuts and the top ceramic surface layer has a surface flatness of five microns so all the mechanical engineers out there probably getting moist over that i don't know let me know is that good or not five micron flatness over this entire module so the ceramic substrate here is made with a mixture of alumina powder glass powder organic binder and plasticizers and all sorts of stuff so you know really just incredible uh material science involved in this just you know the manufacture of this board anyway you can see the capacitors down here and we let's find one that's ripped off because i did rip off a few there we go there's the little pad for the uh capacitor down there and yep i can feel that oh look at that look at that the the solder i'm going to use that terming quote marks the solder look at how i can just like this has not been heated up at all so they're obviously using some sort of i i you know weird-ass um metallurgy here for the solder on these things i'm going to assume that it's the same for the chips as well but there for the uh capacitor there's the capacitors okay i'm going to try and get this off okay i'm going to put a little bit of force on that tongue at the right angle yeah all right she's budging there it is there it is have you ever taken off a chip with that sort of ease ah this is just this is magical this is a and floating around in oil oh this is my favorite thing ever this is just incredible a floating oil a capacitor floating with oil oh my goodness which you can just imagine being able to take off chips with that sort of ease ah lewis rossman eat your heart out okay people are going to be horrified but i'm going to try and do this with one of the chips oh people are going to be more i mean we've got like hundreds more pads on here hundreds and hundreds of more pads but let's see oh no i'm putting a lot of force on that oh i'm putting all my hands slipping don't you hate it when your hand slips due to the oil jeez yeah i can't i can't make that budge but certainly the capacitors piece of cake they just go off like that oh this is so much fun oh this is great let's flip the there's our cap there you go we flipped our cap over and there it is 16 pad capacitor which looks like it contains because we saw the top of it over here does it contain four individual caps like that perhaps i don't know anyway you can see that they're just like there's no no traces coming off there they're just buggering off down in the internal layers and you can't see through these layers because they're like ceramic they're a ceramic slurry uh substrate and as i said like individual vias um down in there we're talking hundred micron holes um and these are all you know like i don't know test pads not sure what the deal is i assume you know some sort of test pads something like that i'm never going to get this oil off i'm not even going to try ugh i'm already starting to get oil over everything here so yeah but anyway this is absolutely remarkable we've got 648 pin so i guess you could call that bga uh although you know they wouldn't have used that term back in the day i don't think and the inner layers apparently are made of a uh moddy molly denim if i'm pronouncing that correctly molly denim um powder so yeah this is not these are not like copper exposed etched pcbs this is not what's happening here this is an entirely different technology to what you're used to with your fiberglass uh circuit boards um it's just yeah it's not the same thing all right i'm going to get medieval on a task i'm going to get in there with a big pair of pliers ah sorry this has got a flame comment down below go ahead i don't care i'm i'm gonna kind of give that a little uh you can get that a little twisty life's pretty straight without twisties oh yeah yeah yeah no oh i know i've come a gutter look at that but at least we can see under it we can see under it so that's useful there you go wow okay yeah you can see a similar similar thing to the caps in there you can see the individual solder pads once again i look i'm going to clear this away yeah yeah look look you can see the solder yep it's the same thing it just spreads like that so this is not your regular solder that you are used to because this is room temperature here this has not been heated up wow so yeah we just completely shattered that dye this absolutely butchered it sorry about that but that's fascinating to see under that and confirm that it's basically the same interconnection uh technology as what the was what was under the capacitor there which makes sense of course so is this some doug henning metallurgical magic well i don't think so i had a look at the document and it actually specifies yes it's solder and it specifies it as 97.3 solder so another 60 40 rubbish but yeah 97.3 it's not some magic room temperature solder or something like that so i've got to assume that's what's here so why does it seem to wipe off like that well i can actually this is not feeler vision but i can actually feel the bumps in there what's actually happening here and why i was able to magically use the jones method for desoldering this chip just push it right off um is because of the tiny pitch and the tiny amount of solder that we've got here uh we're talking 16 pads here but these pad dimensions i checked are only 180 microns wide so that's like seven thou wide pads on here so there's practically no solder on there these aren't balls on the bottom of the chip right these are just like they've just applied the solder paste however they apply it and they've refloated you know in a not too dissimilar manner to what you're used to but there's just so such a tiny little piece ant amount of solder on there that the sheer force of that just my force was enough to just break all of those pads at once it's only 16. i guess the mechanical engineers out there please you can you know if you can do a like a some sort of sheer analysis or something i'm probably not using the right terminology but anyway with 180 micron wide 97.3 solder you'll probably find that yeah you can just push these chips off with a bit of force now why don't the pads rip off because this was what would happen if you tried this at home don't try it at home kitties uh you'll the pads will just rip right off a regular fiberglass board even though like the real high quality high temperature ones most likely because a tiny little seven thou pad in their 180 micron pad size uh there's going to be virtually no adhesive under there although it might not come off because you've got the vr in the middle but i don't anyway if you relied on a tiny little pad like that there'd be virtually no like an adhesive on there to hold those pads in place and you just shear them all off um you'd completely come a gutser and yeah do not try the jones method for uh desoldering your bga parts because it's not gonna work and look over here we haven't ripped off a single pad why is that is because well this is like you know this is what you get when you pay you know like a hundred thousand dollars um this is like you know the best that the ibm research scientists can come up with this is you know not just regular fiberglass this is like you know some ceramic woo woo mixture of stuff and it's all just embedded in there and these pads are they're probably never coming off i put a lot of force on that anyway that'd be fantastic if you could repair chips like that but unfortunately yeah don't try it on anything but ibm magic woowoo so i mentioned this document and i won't go through it i'll just link it in down below but it's uh done by j.u nicobaka winning um and friends of course um and it's basically them they're a bunch of ibm research scientists is basically them boasting about all this marvelous technology that they've got in these uh you know ceramic uh modules in the construction of them and everything and it's highly recommended worth a read absolutely fantastic so just think of the people that went into actually making this thing um and the technologies involved in manufacturing this and they're thanking these various divisions within ibm for doing it anyway ju nicobacca apparently had a distinguished career at ibm i don't know where he's now i published like 90 papers or something i had to look impressive so there you go i hope you enjoyed that as much as i did and i've got oil all over my fingers and thank you very much jim for sending this in this was absolutely pornographic technology absolutely fantastic i'd love to like maybe you know like x-ray this or something like that i don't know what we see you just see 63 layers of interconnections and stuff like that under here so it's got 400 meters of wiring inside this by the way um for those wondering uh which doesn't sound like a lot but i guess it is when you stretch it all out anyway um yes 63 layers of state of the art ceramic pcb manufacturing technology from 1991 absolutely incredible and this had like half the number of mips as an 80 486 at the time but as i said you know it's you're not comparing apples to apples there so wow um that's absolutely incredible i hope you enjoyed that as much as i did if you did please give it a big a thumbs up and as always you can discuss down below or over on the eev blog forum or over on any all of the alternative uh platforms that i'm on and i'm also on the twitters i'm on the instagrams i'm on the flickrs i'm everywhere catch you next time you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 650,067

Rating: 4.7866597 out of 5

Keywords: eevblog, video, vintage computer, ibm 9121, ibm mainframe, teardown, processor, ibm system 390, ibm es/9000, ceramic, ceramic pcb, ceramic hybrid, soldering, desoldering

Id: xQ3oJlt4GrI

Length: 29min 44sec (1784 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020

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[u/whyrweyelling]

That thing looks intense.

That's what she said.

[u/kingofhan0]

How good do you think that thing is for gaming?

[u/ibm_boi]

nothing like american made silicone

[u/CurlyHairJosuke]

This is so expensive... why?

[u/Mobiusman2020]

25 years? Pentiums were around in 1993. Pentium II around 95 or 96. It had to have been a gubment thing...

[u/TRI3TECH]

What's the clockspeed on this thing?