Where in the world?

CPUs

The heart of your PC is the CPU, and its manufacturing process has been refined over the ages by companies like Intel and AMD. Intel has one of its biggest manufacturing plants in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fab 11 was expanded in 2003 in a $2 billion dollar programme, and was named the best fab in the world in 2003 by Semiconductor International magazine. What an honour, eh?

The plant pumps out roughly 10,000 wafers a month, and each of those contains hundreds of chips, which might be Pentium 4s, Itaniums or newer Pentium M and Yonah chips. This is just one of Intel's many fabs - you can see that the chip above comes from Costa Rica.

Of course, design is one of the biggest concerns for any CPU, and engineers – be they Intel or AMD ones – put an incredible amount of effort into making sure that the architecture of the chip they are designing is an optimal one for its purpose. Of course, they don't always get it right – the latest Pentium 4 architectures have been highly criticised for an inefficient design that makes them slower than their AMD competitors – but the task isn't an easy one when you're dealing with millions and millions of individual transistors on a single chip.

Consequently, hundreds of engineers may work on a single chip to ensure its optimum performance, and millions of dollars are spent each year on further research and technology upgrades to enable the next generation of processors to be created. The creating is almost the easy bit. Some of Intel's best design work is done in its facilities in Israel, which is where the Centrino concept was hatched.

With Intel operating primarily out of the States, its rival's major chip fabrication plant is in Dresden, Germany. Built with plenty of German taxpayer's money as a helping hand, the AMD plant is the home of the Opteron and much of its flash memory capacity. AMD's main offices are out in California but the majority of the manufacturing is done in Europe.

Other major fabricating plants are based out in Taiwan. TSMC makes many chips for the graphics industry, and IBM manufactures in Taiwan too. IBM is currently spending lots of time making Cell processors for Sony's new PlayStation 3, as well as multi-core processors based on its PowerPC technology for the Xbox 360. TSMC has made the GeForceFX chips for Nvidia, as well as the X800 series of chips for ATI.

Cooling

Of all the places in the world you would expect hardcore cooling to thrive, you really wouldn't expect it to be Scandinavia. Isn't it cold enough there already? Apparently not quite cold enough for Asetek, who are based in Denmark.

Asetek are well-known for their Vapochill line of phase-change coolers, which act rather like a fridge, superchilling gas to be sent via a hose to the CPU, keeping it at sub-zero temperatures. If that incredible degree of cooling is a little too much for you, however, Asetek have recently launched a line of heatsinks that might be a little more, well, sane. The Microchill coolers use heatpipe technology to transfer heat away from the CPU and keep your system ticking over just nicely, whether you're in sub-zero temperatures or the Bahamas.

As if that wasn't enough, Scandinavia is also home to one of the world's top overclockers, a fellow by the name of Macci. Known for his work with liquid nitrogen, Macci hails from Finland, and has recently been taken under the ATI wing.

Zalman has recently signed gaming supreme Fatal1ty to promote their new range of coolers. Maybe they're hoping the pro-gaming superstar will be able to frag Kim Jong-Il out of the match, because, based in South Korea, the political climate has got to be a little nerve-wracking, to say the least. Imagine if the crazy North Korean dictater suddenly pushed the button and we were left without any more stock of top-notch watercooling reservoirs, silent graphics heatsinks and totally quiet heatpipe cases? Disaster would be an understatement.