Which raises an interesting question: What part of a synthetic person is analogous to an organic person's brain?
I think this was addressed in comic no. 3008:
"Triple-reinforced AI drives. You could run them over with a tank and they'd be unharmed. Our combatants may sustain significant chassis damage, as you've seen, but their drives, their core selves, are never in any danger."
http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3008(CORPSE WITCH is holding up an example of the hardware in question, and it appears to be about the size of a soda can.) The implication is that everything other than the "AI drive" is the "chassis" and can be replaced without changing the "core self". The processor does not appear to be considered part of the "core self". Perhaps compatibility is
so finicky that the processor must be 100% compatible, no BS, I mean it, really 100% compatible right down to the designers initials that they worked into the chip as a joke, or the AI won't run at all?
All this applies only to the "robot" style AI's that inhabit a single body and function like one person in one place at a time. Momo mentioned once (I think it was to Emily) that the
really intelligent AI's run a human-like personality as only one of many tasks that they have going on simultaneously. I assume that "Station" is an example of one of these. Since "Station" was Hannelore's childhood friend, this implies that the really intelligent distributed AI's have been around for more than a decade.
I suspect that the Anthro-PC's are a distraction invented by the more powerful AI's so that the bulk of the human race will associate "artificial intelligence" with quirky ineffectual beings like Pintsize, May, and Punchbot and not think about the real AI's that run their world.