Why Intel Moved the CPU’s Pins to the Motherboard

#TechHistory #Intel #CPU
Turn over any modern Intel processor and you'll find 1,700 flat gold pads and not a single pin. For twenty years, every CPU looked like a bed of nails, and everyone who built a PC learned to fear a bent pin. In 2004, Intel took the pins off the processor and moved them into the socket on the motherboard. The reason had almost nothing to do with protecting your CPU.

This video follows the pins from the 40-legged Intel 8086 to Socket 478, the electrical problem that pushed current into a desktop chip up roughly eighteen times in seven years, the June 2004 launch of LGA 775 that worried motherboard makers, why AMD went the opposite way the very same month, and why AMD finally followed in 2022 with AM5.

The Objects We Held takes one everyday object at a time and finds the decision hidden inside it. New object every few days.