Cooking With Processors

egg

 While contemplating how to turn my new heat pumping Xbox into a foot cozy, I remembered some links that [h-tech] had sent in.

The first is cooking an egg on a processor in a functional PC. The proc in question is an AMD Athlon XP1500+. The tray is supported by a stack of 1p and 2p sterling coins. After approx. 4 minutes of warm up it took 11 minutes to cook the egg.

The second is a hotplate constructed from 7 Cyrix chips. The chips are wired in parallel to an AT power supply. A piece of cookie sheet is attached to the surface with thermal paste and the power supply is enhanced with

30 thoughts on “Cooking With Processors

  1. You guys know that the Cyrix page is BS, right? It’s a joke. Didn’t happen. He’s using a 5v linear regulator to supply power to the chips. That part has a maximum output of 1 amp at 5 volts. So that means a maximum dissipation of…. get this… 5 watts! Tada! Not going to cook anything, I’m sorry.

    And that’s a best case scenerio. In the real world, since there’s so many processors connected in parallel probably less than one watt would be dissipated in ALL of the Cyrix processors combined. But an astounding 12 watts would be dissipated in the linear regular itself, which would get scortching hot in a matter of seconds.

    I posted a message on the Rabidhardware forums a long time ago about this not being true and Doc (the author) confirmed it. He said it was simply a joke, which is why the article was posted under “Humor.” So no, it did not also successfully cook eggs.

  2. Haha, using an XP 1500? Use a XP 2400 OC’d. Mine got to 60 degrees with a good heatsink and fan running. So, let’s dissipate that 80-watt thing’s heat into some hot dogs!

    But seriously, I could make a case mod for it. And I will. Someday.

  3. Assuming the circuit could provide enough power, to get the maximum heat from those Cyrix chips, they should be computing at full capacity. If I remember my EE classes correctly, most transistors used in logic circuits today only draw current when they’re switching, so if the chips aren’t doing anything, not much power is going to be dissapated.

  4. Wow. This is a really old story (the one with eggs and brown sauce). Not a bad one, but I read this something like 3 years ago. Pretty funny, when you realize the fact that processors give off more heat per square inch than a nuclear reactor.

  5. You would probbaly get cancer or something if your using electricity to actually cook the things, maybe if there is no electronic current passed through the actual egg… but I wouldnt trust it anyway..

    Currently the laptop i’m on is running at 60 deg celcius, I could probbaly cook an egg under this biatch (And yes, i know its definately too hot for operation, long story)

  6. Hahaha! That’s a good one [rob]! Processors give off more heat than a nuclear reaction! If it was true, then we wouldn’t have nuclear stations, but processors stations to make electricity! That’s a really funny one!

  7. That mobile phone egg thing doesn’t work, I tried with three phones for one egg for an hour. Admittedly they were only phoning the 02 top-up line, but they are still transmitting.

  8. yeah… the cellphone egg thing is fake. In fact, I just watched an episode of Brainiac the other day where they tried it with 100 cell phones, and the egg was still completely raw after several minutes.

  9. I wrote the mobile cooking page in 2000 and it is pretty obviously a spoof, especially if you read it in the context of the surrounding pages. It’s in the weekend colour section of the spoof Wymsey Chronicle, the newspaper that serves the imaginery village of Wymsey.

    What’s strange is that the page was written 5 years ago but has had about 200,000 hits this year!

    Anyway, we had 2000 hits from you guys yesterday!

    Charlie :)

  10. Even if the mobile phone gag worked, anyone who’s ever microwaved an egg can tell you why it’s a bad idea. And no, it doesn’t matter if you poke a hole in the bottom first.

    freshly-microwaved egg + cold metal spoon = an astounding number of tiny, red-hot egg particles on every exposed surface.

  11. I have harvested allready 100 ceramic Pentium CPU’s for my bathroom floor and will try to get 4-6 times more. I also consider making them to heat the floor. This cyrix-joke-site was missing a very important thing – CMOS chips dont’t disspate much heat in static regime i.e. without clock. Actually I’m not sure that clock only is enough. Maybe some pseudo random signals to data control lines would be good? OK, I’ll study some datasheets first…

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