Luckily for the collector, each Intel CPU has written on it something called an sSpec, which is a five-digit code (such as SL52R) that uniquely identifies each class of chip. For instance, the SL52R is a 1GHz Pentium III Coppermine with 256KiB of L2 Cache and a FSB speed of 133MHz.

As with any collection, there is a bit of a challenge with some rarer items. For this collection, my hope is to get my hands on one of the recalled 1.13GHz chips produced in 2001. They were recalled due to being completely awful and crashing all the time, so finding one might be difficult.

For me, the Coppermine core represents a pinnacle in x86 micro-architecture design. After the Coppermine and Tualitin core designs (both based on Intel’s P6 micro-architecture), Intel decided to up the ante with the Netburst micro-architecture. Netburst, used for about 4 years in the Pentium 4 series, was widely known for producing more heat than a 2-bar radiator. Indeed, when Intel went back to design the Pentium M and Core 2 CPUs, they based them off the P6 micro-architecture.

I truly believe that computers today don’t need half the power they have. Recently I tried BeOS, an operating system that hasn’t even existed for most of a decade. That ran fine on hardware half as powerful as a Coppermine CPU. It could do email (quite nicely, too), web browsing (with Flash), an office suite is available, all the usual productivity applications. But, it didn’t consume 6GB of hard drive space to do so, didn’t need 1GB of RAM (the virtual machine running it uses about half of it’s 128MB allocation), and didn’t need a 2GHz processor (these are rough installation specs for Windows Vista). It’s starting to become more and more clear to me that we are just wasting so much time, money and energy on doing things that don’t need to be done, like Aero.

So where was I? Oh yeah, bidding on old CPUs.