Reclaimed PPC chips from Mac accelerators

[Nlandas]

Since there seems to be a short supply of PPC chips and there are still some hardware developers out there with the know how to design PPC accelerators, I was just wondering why no one has started reclaiming old Mac PPCs from their processor daughtercards.

I work for a school and we are actually to the point where we are recycling PPC 604es at this point. I imagine that there must be 1000s of Macs being recycled that could have chips pulled from them. (Obviously, they are surface mounted.)

Has any developer looked at this?

[Nlandas]

Oli_hd wrote:

(Obviously, they are surface mounted.)

Worse, they are BGA, which when you remove they leave the balls they sit on behind, reballing them isnt a major job but it does add to the cost.
And anyway who said they are hard to get? 603e's for example can be bought from Digikey.

I guess I remember reading that all PPC chips were in short supply and that's one of the reasons why Apple was shifting to Intel. However, I guess that could have just been that the manufacturer's couldn't keep up with the demand for the current PPC Apple was using.

So we don't have any PPC accelerators any more because it's simply not large enough of a market so the production cost would be so high that even though I want one, I probably couldn't afford to justify spending on my classic hardware?

-Nyle