A Geek Goes Flying

Very brief, and incomplete, but I’ll add to it as I go. In the beginning (the 1970s), CPUs shipped in Dual In-line Package (“DIP”) packaging: DIP These were ubiquitous in the late 70s and early 80s, but they became impractical above 40 pins, which led to some interesting design compromises, like the 24-bit address bus and 16-bit external data bus of the Motorola 68000: But these could be through-hole mounted, or socketed, and it was what it was. Following that, we start getting into interesting diversions, like 68-pin PLCC (Plastic Leaded Chip Carrier) and 68-pin Ceramic LCC (Lead Less Chip Carrier) packages, commonly seen on the 80286, starting in the early 1980s: PLCC CLCC Starting more-or-less around the era of the 80386 and the 68030, came Pin Grid Array, used for, e.g., socketed (and through-hole soldered) CPUs through the mid-2000s at least, when Intel switched to Land Grid Array (LGA) for the Pentium 4 (and a couple of years later, moved Xeon over) (AMD still uses PGA for ma...

My old, dead, Mac Pro had a 6-core X5680 Xeon at 3.33 GHz. The “new” one came with dual 6-core X5650 2.66 GHz processors. Things have gotten so cheap, I picked up a pair of X5675s (3.06 GHz 6-core, the fastest processors Apple shipped in a dual processor Mac Pro 5,1 configuration) on eBay for $19 with free shipping. So now I had to install them. (I haven’t installed a processor since the days of the Socket 370 . (Edit: I’d only installed one processor, an i5-3570K in a Hackintosh I built in 2011. Forgot about that...)) (Also edit: I looked up the TDP for these processors; the X5675s are 95W, while the X5860s and higher are 130W, so 70W additional in a dual processor setup. Stuck with the 3.06s because I was worried about the additional heat. Stick with what Apple did stock...)   My exhaustive 5 minutes of Google searching found several videos that came close to being a full guide, but nothing comprehensive, so I figured I’d write out my experience here. The results were awesome, m...