Hector Martin

We have anonymous sources making unsubstantiated wild claims to reporters with a track record of getting it wrong. On the other side, we have unprecedented water-tight denials - on the record and attributed to very senior sources... In your opinion, pretty much even stevens?

I think this sums it up pretty well https://twitter.com/rantyben/status/1047969868039958528 …

As of the last article, they have shrunk to be the “smaller than a grain of sand”. This puts it at less than .5mm. This either means there’s now wirebonding involved or the PCB was modified to accommodate this tiny chip.

Motherboards are not like iPhones, they don’t have 01005 components. They’re larger because it means less precision needed in PCB manufacture, and thus lower cost.

So now I’m expected to believe they either wire bonded this chip in place (which isn’t a machine that exists on the line normally), or they splurged massively on super precision PCBs?

Apparently they're saying "not much bigger than a grain of sand"... which can mean anything, really. Apparently anything up to 2mm qualifies as a grain of sand, and a SOT23 is "not much bigger" than that.

Fair, but unless there's Vcc, Gnd, MISO and SCLK conveniently in a ~4mm^2 area where you can easily place this chip, you're going to have to modify the PCB (doable) or run jumpers. Just... why? Plenty of space in that EEPROM package.