The PA-7150 is a microprocessor made by Hewlett-Packard to power their PA-RISC line of computers. Although this achitecture has recently become obsolete, it was quite successful in the professional computing market from 1989 until the early 2000's. These computers usually ran HP-UX (HP's version of UNIX) and were used for number-crunching, simulations, network servers and that kind of stuff.

This is the CPU from an HP 735/125 workstation. It's a 125 MHz version of the 32-bit PA-7150 chip. Inside, there are 850,000 transistors, made in a 0.8 micron process with three metal layers, called the CMOS26B process (according to OpenPA.net - a very interesting site about all things PA-RISC). Note that this ceramic package has a screw terminal at the top to attach a heat sink.

Here's what it looks like on the inside. Very neat digital circuits, connected to the outside world by shiny gold bondwires.

Somewhere in the centre of the chip. I have to say that it looks really pretty for a digital system.

"The Bird is the Word"... The lyrics from a 1960's song by the Trashmen plus the Ford Thunderbird logo make for a nice piece of chip art.

Another piece of art is located in another corner. This time it's a Rolex watch, so I'm guessing it's sitting next to the clock circuits :-)

Just remember that the real artwork is contained in here: the thousands of transistors that make the chip do what it's being payed to do ;-)