Inside every processor is a flat piece of silicon, usually smaller than a fingernail. To see it you have to sand or dissolve the package away and photograph what is left through a microscope. A handful of people do this and give the pictures away, most of all Pauli Rautakorpi, ZeptoBars in Moscow, John McMaster and a photographer who posts as Fritzchens Fritz. These are the 356 processors they have photographed, from 1972 to 2024.
Click a chip to see it large. True scale draws the 114 whose size we know at the same scale, so a 1970s chip is a speck next to a modern one.
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Pauli Rautakorpi (162), Fritzchens Fritz (68), John McMaster (36), Martijn Boer (20), Cole L (16), ZeptoBars (10), Sean Riddle (4), Antoine Bercovici (4), Ken Shirriff (3), Mister rf (3), Epop (3), InfoSecDJ (3), Nick V. Chernyy (3), and 21 from 18 other photographers. Every photo keeps its own licence, shown when you open a chip, and links back to where it was published: Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, ZeptoBars, Siliconpr0n and the CPU Graveyard wiki. Die sizes come from the photographers' own notes and Wikipedia's transistor count tables. If a chip is missing, nobody has released a free photo of it yet.