It's hard to tell what they have unless you test them. Most of the silver you see on the inside, so far as my experience has been, is Pd (Palladium). Some of them actually yield a fairly good amount of Pd per lb, in the neighborhood of 1-2 grams, almost the same yield as MLCCs. In a few cases there is Pd and Pt, sometimes it's Pd and Ag. Just depends on the chips.
Generally speaking, refiners, if they are being careful, pay per lb when the metals are unknown, what they believe they can risk in relation to unknown metals the eproms might contain. That is why you see refiners paying less than what you might should get, not because they are trying to rip you off but rather they are trying to make sure they don't over pay.
If you do a little research on your chips on a site like Global Spec:
GlobalSpec - Engineering Search & Industrial Supplier Catalogs
As an example I did a quick search using "Pentium Pro" as the search string. Here were the results:
GlobalSpec - Searchable Engineering Catalogs on the Net
I know that looks like a lot of information, but you can scale your search down for exact results. The site collects and makes available information and specs on different items. There is a wealth of information on the site. If you have a bunch of ERPOMS and not sure what types of metals they might contain, or if you have ICs and/or Proms in quantity that are the same, it might be worth while to pull the specs, find out the metals used in the manufacture and sometimes even how much was used in each chip. I know I have said this before, but I'm going to mention it again. With a little extra work on the scrapping side, and adding this information to your sale, you will make more money. It's a value added service you are providing the end buyer. Anytime you do anything extra with your material, you are adding value. When I refine silver to such high purity that you can see the metal crystal structure in the bar, I just added value to my silver bar, and can command a price above what normally a silver bar would command because it has value beyond just the silver content.
Scott
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