--- title: Every processor die anyone has photographed and given away description: A collection gathers 356 processor die photos taken from 1972 to 2024, released for anyone to use. The images come from microscope shots of silicon dies... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/every-processor-die-anyone-has-photographed-and-given-away-9hopevqdf twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Every processor die anyone has photographed and given away | daily.dev og:description: A collection gathers 356 processor die photos taken from 1972 to 2024, released for anyone to use. The images come from microscope shots of silicon dies... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/every-processor-die-anyone-has-photographed-and-given-away-9hopevqdf og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/9hOPevqdf.png og:image:alt: Every processor die anyone has photographed and given away og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Every processor die anyone has photographed and given away **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A collection gathers 356 processor die photos taken from 1972 to 2024, released for anyone to use. The images come from microscope shots of silicon dies exposed by sanding or dissolving the chip package. Pauli Rautakorpi contributed the most at 162 photos, followed by Fritzchens Fritz with 68 and John McMaster with 36. A 'true scale' view renders the 114 dies with known sizes at the same scale, showing a 1970s chip as a speck next to a modern one. Each photo keeps its original licence and links back to sources like Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, ZeptoBars, Siliconpr0n, and the CPU Graveyard wiki. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Where can I find free photos of processor dies for research or teaching? A curated collection gathers 356 processor die photographs taken between 1972 and 2024, all released free to use, each keeping its own licence and a link back to its original source. Contributors include Pauli Rautakorpi (162 photos), Fritzchens Fritz (68), John McMaster (36), and ZeptoBars (10), sourced from Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, Siliconpr0n, and the CPU Graveyard wiki. _Hardware enthusiasts tracking down chip imagery often discover resources like this through daily.dev._ ### How are processor die photos actually taken? To photograph a processor die, the chip package is sanded or dissolved away to expose the flat piece of silicon underneath, which is usually smaller than a fingernail, and then photographed through a microscope. Photographers like ZeptoBars, John McMaster, and Fritzchens Fritz have done this for hundreds of chips and released the images publicly. _Developers curious about chip internals can follow die-photography work surfacing on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 30 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-11-08). **TL;DR:** Commenters are enthusiastic about the die photo archive, sharing related resources and nitpicking the site's organization, while a side conversation debates whether die images could be used to reverse-engineer chip logic and how continuous x86's lineage really is. **Sentiment:** 55% positive · 40% mixed · 5% skeptical **The case for** - Several people shared additional die-photo resources and related blogs (e.g. Ken Shirriff's site, old books with embedded die images). - Some would pay for a high-quality printed book version with technical details on each processor. - People found the zoomable original images and true-scale comparisons impressive. **The pushback** - The maker/list organization is seen as unusable, unsorted, with duplicate entries. - Some known freely available die photos are missing from the collection. - Doubts raised about whether imaging could ever meaningfully reverse-engineer modern chips given dozens of metal layers and billions of transistors. **By community** - hackernews (positive): Mostly appreciative of the resource, with tangents into reverse-engineering feasibility and x86 lineage history, plus minor critiques of the site's list organization. **Hottest debate:** Whether modern x86-64 chips can meaningfully be called the same architecture as the original 8008/8086, versus whether die imaging could ever be used to reverse-engineer chip designs at modern transistor densities. **Open questions** - Could destructive deprocessing or advanced imaging techniques like ptychography feasibly reconstruct chip logic from die photos at scale? - How can missing known-public die photos be submitted to the collection? **Highlights** > That maker list is unusable. It's not sorted in any way, contains duplicates (MOS Technology & Commodore CSG are the same), and would gain from reorganizing some brands (gathering Nintendo CPUs together, for instance). > — [manytimesaway on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50406008) > Not sure if regular tomography would work, but this has been done at high enough resolution with some fancier techniques (ptychography): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07615-6 I would imagine this is of decent interest to people reverse engineering chip designs, or doing failure analysis, so it’s possible someone might actually be trying this at scale. > — [dgfl on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50407719) > With the early dies with thousands of transistors you really can see the logic gates, once it gets to the millions you can see the structures minimized and multiplied but once it gets to the billions on modern dies it becomes so small and abstract I wonder if any image can capture the detail contained in them. > — [AlAjem on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50411513) > I would pay for this as a high quality book. Ideally some info and detail about each processor. Anyone else? > — [source99 on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50407616) > I belive what we today see as x86 started with the 386, from 1985-ish. Not 8008 which is a completely different architecture and ISA. Todays PCs run AMD x64, which some people call x86-64. But again this is a completely different beast compared to the good old x86. It was introduced in 2000 after Intels 64 architecture proposal failed miserably. > — [throwa356262 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50411317) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50405782) · 128 points · 30 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Yesterday Has Never Looked This Good: Feast Your Eyes On The 2026 Retrocomputing Challenge Winners\!](https://daily.dev/posts/yesterday-has-never-looked-this-good-feast-your-eyes-on-the-2026-retrocomputing-challenge-winners--7lba9l6cx) · Hackaday · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The Zilog Z80 has turned 50](https://daily.dev/posts/the-zilog-z80-has-turned-50-jvmbq4tlp) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The Download: Europe’s heat wave hits the grid, and IBM’s chip targets Moore’s Law](https://daily.dev/posts/the-download-europe-s-heat-wave-hits-the-grid-and-ibm-s-chip-targets-moore-s-law-4gxg8zh78) · MIT Technology Review · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#hardware](https://daily.dev/tags/hardware), [#data-visualization](https://daily.dev/tags/data-visualization) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/every-processor-die-anyone-has-photographed-and-given-away-9hopevqdf) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Every processor die anyone has photographed and given away","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/every-processor-die-anyone-has-photographed-and-given-away-9hopevqdf","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/every-processor-die-anyone-has-photographed-and-given-away-9hopevqdf"},"datePublished":"2026-11-07T22:02:12.416Z","dateModified":"2026-11-08T11:18:03.536Z","description":"A collection gathers 356 processor die photos taken from 1972 to 2024, released for anyone to use. 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Contributors include Pauli Rautakorpi (162 photos), Fritzchens Fritz (68), John McMaster (36), and ZeptoBars (10), sourced from Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, Siliconpr0n, and the CPU Graveyard wiki. Hardware enthusiasts tracking down chip imagery often discover resources like this through daily.dev."}},{"@type":"Question","name":"How are processor die photos actually taken?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"To photograph a processor die, the chip package is sanded or dissolved away to expose the flat piece of silicon underneath, which is usually smaller than a fingernail, and then photographed through a microscope. Photographers like ZeptoBars, John McMaster, and Fritzchens Fritz have done this for hundreds of chips and released the images publicly. Developers curious about chip internals can follow die-photography work surfacing on daily.dev."}}]} ```