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Why Were Pentium 2's on Cards? [Byte Size] | Nostalgia Nerd
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- Опубликовано: 17 май 2016
- With the Pentium II, Intel designed a CPU and cache which remained closely integrated, but were mounted on a printed circuit board, called a Single-Edged Contact Cartridge (SECC). In this episode of Byte size, I discuss the reasons behind this switch and also go into details on cache operations in the Pentium Pro, Xeon and Celeron processors, and how they differed from the Pentium II model.
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Pentium 2 images courtesy of Wikipedia/Wikimedia and public domain imagery.
Windows '95 Processor graph discovered through Tom's Hardware - www.tomshardwar...
Information courtesy of "The Complete PC Upgrade & Maintenance Guide, Ninth Edition" by Mark Minasi.
AMD started making slotted CPU's at that time too. At the time we just thought slotted CPU's were the future. We had no idea that CPU's would eventually go back to sockets again.
Athlon Orion. First chip to break 1 GHz barrier, overclocked like crazy (goldfinger!), had half a meg of full-speed cache and it was a beast. I got 650 MHz one, ran at 800, and comparing it to Celeron D 347 (LGA775, 3.06 GHz, and also 512 kB of cache!) the Athlon was much snappier (including faster loading times in Windows, much smoother gaming, and faster response for example when opening programs or switching tasks) despite overall lower processing power. I had those systems side by side - Celeron in Via PT880 Foxconn with 2 GB of DDR2 and PCI-e GF 7600 GT and Athlon on ASUS K7V with 1.5 GB of 133 MHz SD-RAM and GF 7600 GS AGP, buth running from identical HDDs.
@@Vatharian The Athlon Orion (900-1000 Mhz) ran it's 512 KB of L2 cache at 1/3 core speed, not full-speed. This is because it still had external L2 cache chips which couldn't reach high enough speeds for 1/2 core speed.
Athlon 500-700 run their L2 at 1/2 speed (250-350)
Athlon 750-850 run their L2 at 2/5 speed (300-340)
Athlon 900-1000 run their L2 at 1/3 speed (300-333)
The Thunderbird Athlon which was released later for both Slot A and Socket A has 256 KB of full speed L2 cache, but it's the Orion that broke the 1 Ghz barrier before intel could do it with the Pentium III.
References:
www.anandtech.com/show/416/3 (2/5 speed starting at 750)
www.anandtech.com/show/498/2 (1/3 speed for 900-1000)
@@Vatharian back then, each ticks of over clock makes a difference. I used to over clock my cpu 233,lmhz to 240 mhz and see a big performance increase. Now since cpu is fast, thr bottle neck lies everywhere else including ram, gpu and even monitor refresh rate for gaming. Each component need a certain speed to match every other hardware to see increase of performance instead of one component like cpu.
The marketing department had to spin it as such. The logistics department probably wouldn't have been too thrilled with the additional space taken up by a SECC when compared to a socketed CPU (especially with tray CPUs)
I’ve got one of the slotted “cartridge” amd athlons
Talk about a flash back. I actually worked in the factory that made the first P2s. We had a single line and made P2 233/266/300. My first experience with how paranoid they were over quality was when our supplier gave us bad retention clips. Some had metal spurs on them and the concern was they would cut into the cards. We had roughly 10 shark cages full of processors that we had to throw away! I had a blast testing them when we had to "troubleshoot" a tester. and the funny thing was every single CPU was tested and one of the programs that we ran on it was Quake.
A couple of triva items on this. The first units sent out were actually labeled Pentium Pro on the CPUs. Also we always sold them what the lowest bin measured at. So some lucky people who bought a 233 actually had a 300...
Did Intel pay pretty good for the work you guys did back then?
@Chris Russell Lol good point.
Intel was notorious for being picky, top notch quality even if less then perfect products. Yes intel was more expensive compared to AMD and Cyrix, but Intel offered quality. We always knew whatever CPU we bought from Intel it was tested, and could be overclocked at least one level, even the sucker's celeron wasn't a half bad overclocker. But I still don't understand how they could try to sell a cpu with zero level two cache. Even on paper it seems like an idiotic move and hey, it was. Being even slower then a 200 mhz Pentium it replaced, including at least 128k, if not 256k should have been just common sense. 128k would have costs the company next to nothing. The tag chip being under $2 at the time... There was a company we worked with that would put the 466 and 500 mhz mobile chips on the cartridge die giving the system a level 1,2 and level 3 of cache. That same chip combo gave the 667 and 733 mhz copermine chips a challenge, let alone early 100 mhz FSB and celeron versions.
The original poster worked in a silicon fab plant, and has an _appropriate_ RUclips name to match. 👍
The original celeron (the 300) had 0 level 2 cache and they were
seriously crippled and Intel quickly released the celeron 300A with 128
kb on-die level 2 cache running at core speed. These were the true
overclocking heroes, most of them you could go into the bios settings
and set the FSB from 66 to 100 MHz and reboot, giving you a Celeron 300A
running at 450 MHz and, thanks to its full speed 128kB l2 cache, pretty
much equaling the MUCH more expensive, top of the range, Pentium II 450
for a fraction of the cost.
GeFeldz This is pretty much what cheapo AMD overclockers do today xD
I remember unlocking two extra cores on my Phenom X2, essentially giving me an X4 for half the cost (on an already relatively cheap processor line)
333 worked fine on 500 MHz and 515 MHz (if you set 103 MHz on fsb). There was also 366 worked on good motherboards at 550 MHz.
My first gaming system. Celeron 300 over clocked to 450, with a TNT 2 i believe.
I have a 300a and Voodoo 5 sitting here as we speak
300A army remembers. Had to use a dual fan cooler tho. Lol
I remember working for Compaq Tech Support and one of the models didn't have the rails to hold the PII down, people would call in saying their computer didn't work and then we would have to walk them through opening the case and what do you know, the Chip was laying at the bottom of the case. I don't understand what the engineers were thinking when they designed the Mother Board, they thought the socket was good enough to hold the CPU in place.
Interesting.. I got a mb Biostar with a PII400 in it but with no rails (!)
Luckily it's working flawlessly
thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/07/this-hilarious-cisco-fail-is-a-network-engineers-worst-nightmare/#.tnw_3644B8Yy
Maybe the same engineer of compaq created this one.
The Drewman compaq is shit
Do not blame the engineers. Some smart pants product manager had decided to use a motherboard designed for desktop in a tower style case. When you manufacture in large volumes every cent counts and you don't want to tell your boss that you need to spend few more millions for new motherboard design just to make some model vertical.
Dark Mode kind of beating a dead horse there mate.
Does anyone remember the "slocket" adapters that let you put a normal CPU in a SECC mobo?
I do. My brother and I modified ours to take a socketed Pentium III, as older slotkets could only take socketed Celerons. We did this mod after getting a free P3-700 well after they were relevant, but before that the old Celeron in a slotket was the heart behind many of my computer firsts.
It was less a "normal" cpu and more "next generation socket" cpu. The slockets just allowed newer processors to work in overstock slot 1 new builds or as an upgrade path from slot 1. Some minor differences between cpu support and some niche overclock utility. (As I recall at least early on the slockets were able to bypass the cpu's suggested multiplier and let you set jumpers for your own, which helped system stability and janky peripherals that didn't like the PCI bus being not an exact division of 33)
Yes. In 1999-2000 I worked at a computer store building custom machines. I remember when our supplier, Ingram Micro, got cheap and started shipping us slocket adapters with tin leads instead of gold plated. We had a slew of machines go out that would fail to operate randomly until you reseated the cpu adapter. It was a big damn headache.
Yup, sure do.
And years after, I still automatically translate "Celeron" to "Garbage"
Intel© Garbage® processor...sounds about right
Celery vegetable
you could overclock the stuffing out of the Celeron 266 or 300A (300A was the first to have L2 cache)
That isn't where it ends! That's actually just the beginning of the Celeron saga: the first one (Covington) had no L2 cache, but soon after, Intel realized their mistake and released the (superb!) Mendocino with 128 KB of L2 cache running at full clock rate.
Adi Serghei Covington overclocked to 400MHz which made it pretty good at the time.
Some guys were running the 300's at 600mhz. Mine sat at 450 for many many years. 500 was doable for most people.
Lots of people were running the Celeron 300 A at 450 and it ran like a dream, best bang/buck back then.
We had a lot of fun at #celeron on EFNET :). I was running 2 slot one 300A's @ 450 or 500 sometimes with the SMP modification on dual slot one board. I was still a fast machine for many years.
@@Jasonsadventures Can confirm. My uncle had his 300 running at 600. Had to get lucky though.
The reason for the cartridge was to prevent AMD (and others like IDT and Cyrix) from making CPUs for their motherboards. AMD continued making CPUs for socket 7 as did Cyrix. The K6 II and K6 III was from AMD.
Then, AMD decided to make a similar thing as Intel : the Slot A.
Cyrix dropped out of the game and so did IDT.
So, the worlds divided. Now we have Intel CPU motherboards and AMD CPU motherboards.
Yeah, this part is also true. Ciryx and IDT disappeared ....VIA barely made it. kinda survived and invented the mini-itx form factor. And settled for industrial under-powered mini computer.
And now the ARM is dragging us... circular..
ARM=Acorn Risc Machine - wiki states that names have changed.. aha..
herauthon four
ARM is dragging us into oblivion?
is it . . depends on which arm.. left or right..
i saw the Acorn StrongARM in 1989
and was already quite impressed..
dual-core; ARM - Intel
could run Windows 3.0 next to
GEM (or whatever it was running..)
Brings back memories. The second computer I built had a Slot A AMD. At the time, I remember thinking the thing needed a ridiculously large heat sink and fan. Doesn't even compare to the heat pipes and all that is needed to cool the high-end CPUs and GPUs now.
Some Pentium III CPUs were slotted too.
Yup, had a P3-800Mhz that was on a card.
I had a Celeron that was on a slot adapter, can't remember what slot it adapted to though.
Slot 1 to Socket 370 adapter, most likely. That's what I did, while running a Swiftech TEC cooler and -40C temperatures. I actually beat Intel to 1Ghz using an Intel CPU, but I assumed it had been done before - only to hear about it in the news a few weeks later.
I did that with a Celeron of some type, IIRC. That machine did me well, but I had to use a full sized box fan to keep it cool :p
Wrong. Pentium III CPU first came out ONLY on Slot 1. I know because I bought one before socket 370 even existed. You can buy a true Slot 1 PIII from 450mhz all the way up to 1133mhz and NO they are not on a Slot 1 to 370 adapter, they are all genuine Slot 1 units. A simple wiki look up would have shown you this.
Are you saying I'm wrong?
I was responding to JaminandShara Mills about their use of a slot adapter.
I eventually went with dual Socket 370 - I haven't gone back to one core since :p
Pfft, who the hell would play Quake in high resolution? 320x240p all the way.
yup with d_mipcap 5 and d_mipscale 5
d_mipscale boii :D
@@LegendLength I play Quake at 1920x1200 and I get 826.9420747 fps
Let me fix some misinformation:
0:34 First Pentium PROs had 256K of built in memory, 512K came later.
0:40 Pentium PRO's L2 cache was `talking to the CPU' at full speed, this was reduced in later Pentium II chips to ½ of the core speed.
0:56 Nope, 1M Pentium PRO had three on-package chips: CPU core and 2x 512K cache. I've seen a few tons of Socket 8 boards, *none* of them had cache on board (although it was mentioned in some magazines that it could, same for Slot 1).
1:45 Ehm, now you mention full-speed bus? See 0:40.
2:51 No Pentium PRO board had any room for cache (see 0:56). Pentium PRO was sometimes faster, 'cause its cache run at 200MHz, whereas P-II 333 cache run at 166MHz and had a bit higher latency.
3:41 There was more to this story: after people were outraged with Celeron 300 performance, Intel released Celeron 300A with 128K of *full* speed L2 cache built on-die, making it quite a good performer. In fact it was popular for overclockers, as they could put it on 100MHz bus (see B21 mod) running at 450MHz (yay!)
Cheers
you left out the part where PPro's today are upgraded by mashing them up to remove the gold which is sold to buy a new cpu.
the ppro was also a little ahead of its times, as it was optimized for 32bit only, in fact in 16bit it was slower than p55c (mmx pentium). the celeron-a was more popular in its socket 370 implementation, where you could overclock it without modding the slot (the more used was the 366@550, or more). there was also a (relative) cheap dual socket board (abit bp6) with which you could build a very fast dual 366@ 550mhz (at least)
argoneum ok now I'm subbing you
the pentium pros with 256/512/1024kb cache all released at the same time in 1995... they were simply at different price points... the only other processor ever relased for socket 8 was the 333MHz overdrive chips...
The similarities to RyZen Threadripper, a modern package-based CPU lineup, are interesting as well.
I remember when I first got a Pentium 4 that was over 1 GHz, all of my friends told me I wouldn't need all that power.
Now I have a quad core i7. lol
we will always need more power until we have a matrix like real-life simulation
The Pentium 4 was good at the Gigahertz race with its Netburst crap, but not much else. They abandoned the whole architecture for the Pentium M which performed a lot better with lower powerdraw.
@@travelguy78 which is based on pentium 2/3 P6 gen
BigLBA1 But we have processors that can overclock to 5GHz now. I mean the world record is 8GHz, double of youre so-called "real barrier" and that was done on a AMD bulldozer :/
BigLBA1 You fail to adress multiple cores.
I spent $1200 on a P2 400mhz cpu... Only to be matched by a celeron 300A at $160 with the fsb set to 133 and out performed in tribes and counter strike.
I had a Celeron A 266mhz overclocked at 400 form day one. Best CPU buy ever.
The Celeron 300A was later $79, OC'd to 450+ speeds, and, kept up with the P2-400 in gaming...
It takes more than just clock rate to merit equal or superior speed. Matched? Not really.
@@sonialevitin464 If one buys a CPU for gaming, and a $150 CPU delivers the same frame rate as a $600 CPU, most will choose the former. (The Celeron 300a was famous, and a few lucky folks got $285 P3/600A to run at $635 P3/800EB speeds, and, some at 150 MHz FSB got 900 MHz...)
@@sonialevitin464 actually in that particular case we did all the benchmarks(at a lan party) both synthetic and in games and Celeron A at the same clock as Pentium II was only 4-5% behind at worst, most of the time equal and sometimes even better(1-2%), because second level cache can slow down some code.. like games at the time. The only difference between the two processors was second level cache anyway.
So I don't know what exactly is your take on this.. but you don't seem to have done your homework.
The slot design is still my favorite CPU packaging ever. Very robust and easy to swap. If you can plug a video game cartridge, you can change the CPU. There's no need to worry about breaking any heatsink retaining tabs or bending any pins.
I've dealt with a lot of motherboards from this period, and broken sockets are quite common on boards with traditional sockets.
I hadn't heard of broken PGA sockets but bent pins were certainly a big issue. I actually broke a pin when attempting a BSEL mod on a P4, rendering the entire CPU useless.
@@eDoc2020 I prefer the PGA sockets to LGA, the LGA pins on the motherboard are super easy to bend or break. The pins on the CPU with PGA are much more durable. And the socket is also more durable than an LGA socket.
I don't know why were on card but what I know is that PII's were awesome machines !
I still use a PII400 today for watch dvds, audio-video editing and some gaming(games from 1996 to 2001)
You forgot to mention what a beast that original Celeron was. It could easily be OC'd and would destroy the PII and even some early PIII's. The original Celeron's are legendary.
That's because it was the same processor (only with less cache).
the original had no level two cache
The Celeron that was legendary was the 300A. The Celeron 300A HAD LEVEL 2 cache at 128K that ran at full cpu speed and could beat Pentium II's in some cases which had more cache but ran at half speed. The original celeron without cache was undesirable.
the original celeron was dog shit and beaten by amd k6-2 lol
*****
Celeron/Pentium had better floating point performance while K6 had better integer performance, at the same clock speed.
ahh my old 440bx chip set was awesome back in the 90s I miss the days of quake and doom 56k data fax and ISA cards
I had a slot 1 450 p2 it was good for a while with a voodo 2.
This was a monstrous chipset.
I´ve made some experiences with my old and cheap mainboard and it overcloked very well.
My best setup was a Pentium III-S 1400mhz with 750MB of memory and a Geforce Quadro.
My dream was to get a ABIT BX133, but it was very expensive and hard to find.
Marcelo Henrique that chipset sounds familiar, was it rdram?
I remember these systems well too. I remember working in the fab helping make 440BX chip sets, they were a good source of pride and income for the factory.
Mbit Gbit missing doom and quake sure, but 56k modem, fax and isa slot hell no!
>one thousand twenty four kilobytes
>half-megabyte
Why are we switching orders of magnitude in the same sentence?
just to fuck with your OCD :P (it did cross my mind when he said it though :P and for pedants, it's actually a mebibyte ;D)
It's not an OCD issue. It's a problem because the sentence is structured to compare two numbers that are being expressed only verbally. Switching to the bigger order of magnitude implies it's a bigger number, while it's exactly half the number expressed to the lower prefix. The information is the same regardless, but it's a more confusing way of expressing the numbers than was really necessary.
Because its fun
Wait what??? Half a Meg is 512 not 1024 🤔🤔
@@andrewszombie Oh wait, you're right.
My friend had a Pentium Pro. I'll never forget seeing it for the first time and thinking 'bloody hell..look at the size of that thing'. A huge slab of gold ready to rock and roll :)
Now the thread ripper takes that size
I had a Pentium Pro 90mhz. It performed as well as my Pentium 1 @166mhz. Running Win98. Those were the days...
Back in the day, I thought I could add few more CPUs in ISA Slot.
bwahahaha OMG. That's amazing! :D
Damn, this brings back memories. I had a Micron PC Pentium Pro 200
I've always wanted to know why they went with a slot design for that generation, thanks for explaining that. I'm curious why they never revisited that form factor, though, if it provided obvious chip testing benefits without any particular downfalls..?
I think if consoles take a path of upgradeability with processors Etc, we'll see a return to cards for them!
+Larry Bundy Jr Isn't Sony rumored to have a upgraded PS4 in the works? Maybe they could provide whatever upgrade the new console will have ( PS4.2 ? ) to the owners of the original PS4 in the form of a card or something similar ... Oh, and by the way Larry, Your channel is awesome!
Greg Lyris
Thanks bud! :) Yeah, if they have something in the works, we'll hear about it next month at E3. But Microsoft might be the ones to do an upgradable console first.
+Larry Bundy Jr You may be right. I heard some strange rumours about wireless upgrade packs as well..... whud?
Nostalgia Nerd I remember that MS said the XB1 would never need to be upgraded as they could use GPU's to process the power at their HQ, so they'd never need to be upgraded, so you'd be streaming games. Kind of like OnLive.
I remember this also.
PII MMX 450 Mhz + 3dfx Voodoo II 12 MB SLI was the very best you could get then. It blew the then popular consoles (PSX, N64) away, but it also costed quite a lot. But if you could afford it (or your dad was a computer shop owner), you were able to play stuff like Unreal, NFSIII, Half-Life, etc in stunning 1024x786 resolution (back then seen as "HD") at 60 fps.
The budget build was Celeron 333 Mhz, which was a good overclocker and a single 8 MB Voodoo II which also was not a shabby system back then (certainly better than the consoles).
If you still have a working PII/VII build, it's very worth maintaining as a retro gaming PC.
the most useless upgrade i ever did was from a celeron 466 to a celeron 500.
Indeed!
kaltblut ~10% performance boost. Thats better than current intel cpus
what a "boost" ;)
Not quite, you're talking about ipc performance, though.
Rusty Gravel not necessarily. Going from 4.0 to 4.2ghz on the 6700k to 7700k is 5%
My first standard IBM-compatible PC had a Pentium 1 clocked at 133 MHz running Windows 95. I think it was 1996 and the only reason I made the decision at the time to switch to a Windows PC from my Commodore Amiga after all those years was because my friend's neighbor invited us over one day to show us Warcraft II and Diablo and we were absolutely blown away by them. :)
OMG! I remember those Pentium commercials back in the day.
I still miss the slot era Intel/AMD CPUs, sooo much easier to install and impossible to break haha.
Would be difficult to cool nowadays. Those CPU packs already became too hot so Intel added a little cooler to them. Still remember a bunch of little whiner replacing in mid-2000-ies.
@@KrotowX Air-permeable CPUs?
I remember my Abit Slocket and my celerons 566 and 300. Easy overclock and top performance.
There was something ever so satisfying about these cartridge CPUs. It was also ridiculously easy to upgrade them. No thermal paste, heatsink, or cooler to worry about.
Those were good days for budget minded pc builders. The celeron 300A package had that second chip disabled but the CPU core was the same as what went into top-end pentium 2 and could be easily overclocked to 450 MHz. At those speeds the detriment of no L3 cache was less than the benefit of the higher clock speed. So many of us that were into the early hardware 3d accelerated had those for a couple years. Mine went on to run as the NAS router in my parents' house for the next 6=7 years (running 24/7 although at its original 300 MHz. It replaced an AMD K5 based system that crashed every few days and gave up the ghost entirely within about 4-6 months of router service. The 300A regularly hit the 42.7 day uptime bug in win9x and was eventually replaced by an off-the-shelf router )and was done so just for ease of use... that 300A kept running admirably right up to the end)
Uh you missed the A series celerons buddy. The 300A was an overclock beast for its time.
i remember having one that ran at 1ghz lol. sorry not 1ghz i meant the 1000* model ahhaahh sorry
Yea with the Celys people found out without the cache, the chips were often very overclockable because of less heat and the possibility the cache couldn't handle the speed bump. Which ended up making them preferable for many gamers. Me personally I just held out using my K6-2 400 until AMD released the Athlon 500mhz chip which rocked!
Sure was :) & it had 128 kB L2 cache
Bob Brown 450Mhz easily
yep. i do remmebr those ties when cheappo celeron 300 would overclock to around 500 stable and would basicaly be monster of a thing...
I understood some of these words. Mostly those times when you said chips. Mmmmm...chips...
My first new computer was a PII 333MHz system when I was 17. I worked and saved all summer, and built it myself. Before that, I had a hand-me-down 286 based system. It's an amazing experience to go from command line to GUI interface, an experience too few will have experienced.
Took a networking class and they had tons of old hardware sitting around all the switches and routes we had. One of the drawers in the wiring closet had a Pentium 2 card in it. Funny how I would see this video months after I finished the class.
Praise the Celery 300A !
Ah yes back when I used to spend $200 for 4 MB of RAM
I brought a 4gb hard drive for $80.
MB? I remmeber Buying KB upgrades for my Atari 8bits
@@BlueRice I'm talking 1996
Brings back memories. 1st owned computer rocked a Pentium Celeron processor running at 400mhz.
Remember the original Slot A Athlons? With the "gold fingers" on the board that you could get little hacky dip-switch boards for and change the multiplier :)
I don't know why but I liked "cards" more than chips.
Yeah but most boards had very sturdy plastic mountings. It was often a pain to intentionally remove a P2 from its slot because you didn't easily find a grip on that CPU while releasing the two latches.
Alot of misinformation in this video. Only the first two celeron models came without L2 cache. The rest of the eight 250nm models all had on-die 128kbs full speed cache. Nostalgia Nerd obviously has not lived through this era of computers.
Or couldn't remember :p
And wasn't the celeron with full speed cache and the p2 only half speed? I have seen a lot of comparisons where the celeron overclocked flogs the p2 and even slot 1 p3 in a lot of games due to the faster cache apparently.
2:35 The dancing capacitors are so sweet
My first from scratch build was a PII 300 MMX in 2000. Loved that machine. So much faster than the 386 and 486 computers that I had been messing with.
So why was it on cards?
Because card rhymes with lard.
Because having the cache built directly on the CPU package lowered their yield (They would have to throw out the entire CPU even if it was only the cache that was faulty). By putting the cache on an external circuit board (the slot thing) they could reduce this waste by swapping out the cache if it was faulty without having to toss the CPU also. In other words, they used slots because it saved them, (and their customers) money.
rnbpl because the speed of the communication channel would inherit too much cross talk over a socket and was unreliable. The chips had to be kept close and data line lengths tuned for match propagational delay.
Nostalgia Nerd why not just answer him or link? I still dont know why it was on a card
It's mentioned in the video, and chris kerley already answered.
My first computer had a Slot 1 Celeron 333Mhz
My first computer had a ~5mhz 8088 x86 CPU LOL, it was a Tandy 1000HX.
Mine has a 2mhz 6502A with 4K of ram. VTech Creativision, AKA the "Dick Smith Wizzard". God I loved that thing, but updating to a Z80 4mhz/128K Amstrad a few years later was like being blasted into a star trek episode. Oh how we where naive in the good old 80s.
LOL I know the feeling. When I went from a Tandy1000 HX to a Tandy1000 TL2 (80286 CPU), it was nice but a small jump. I used that computer FOR YEARS.. So when I went from it to a 486 DX4 100.. It was like getting blown for the first time.. You smiled for days and all your friends knew who the man was.. :-D
A shitty acer OEM computer with P233MMX (the good part), 32MB SDRAM PC100, S3 Trio64V+ and NO 3D accelleration. Had to stay like that for years.
Mine was a Pentium 2 350MHz, on the same slot :)
My now wife had a Pentium II when I met her online (in the year 2000!), whereas I had a Pentium 200 MMX Overdrive. Later, I moved in with her, combining my nice video card with her more powerful PC. The computer case later became our son's first PC (a Celeron), when I spray-painted it in primary colours. You have to love the way you can exchange PC components...
Severity One lewd
Many fond memories of overclocked celery and voodoo cards. PC building today just doesn't have the same visceral adventure feeling.
I found a Pentium 3 on a card the other day.
Anthony Rock Yup! The original Pentium III CPUs used a SECC2 cartridge (Intel loved changing slots and sockets often). My first custom built PC used a Pentium 500 cartridge.
Eventually they switched them to (I think) Socket 370
not only did intel do this, so did AMD. the intel was slot 1, the AMD was slot A. how do i know this? i had an Athlon slot A processor.
I also had the slot 1 and slot A, think I still have one or both maybe in storage somewhere, good memories, because my first 1GHz pc's were on slot A and slot 1
I had the slotted version of the PIII, I recall that AMD's original Athlon line also shipped as a slotted unit. Kind of a strange novelty in PC history,
I had one of these!!
I must've thrown it away. I miss it so much.
Pentium 2, pentium 3, amd K6
I loved trying to explain Celeron's nonexistent cache to clients while in the pc repair business. All they saw was the lower price tag. The term "paying less cash for no cache" helped to confuse things, and was quickly rephrased because they didn't understand what a cpu cache was and why they (probably) needed it.
Oh the joys of my 1990's youth. And Celeron's are still being produced. Along with the new pentium chips. Yup, Intel sure has some low cost options, but you'd get better performance out of a similarly priced AMD chip. That's definitely not something I could have said (with a straight face) in the 90's.
I like my Intel chips, but AMD has come a LONG way. You go, little buddy. Competition is a good thing for the industry.
Compaq had made the brilliant decision to mount the card in a position that allowed it to hang from the slot. I cannot count the amount of service calls I went on just to push the processor back into the slot.
Once again, excellent! I believe I still have some PII and PIII CPU's in the basement as well as the motherboards they ran on.
Celeron 300A was my first CPU in my very first PC. (I didn't know what a beast that was at the time, it was just cheaper and recommended for games) When I myself opened my PC later, to upgrade my graphics card (thankfully it had an AGP slot)... I was amazed that the CPU was also in a slot and not in a socket. I still didn't had Internet back then (1999 was the year)... and was getting all my knowledge about the PCs from game magazines. For me my first PC was like going from 0 to 100... after that I was never that amazed at PC build, no matter how powerful it was.
In the end, l2 cache wasn't as important as people thought. Even the celeron was a good deal.
P3 changes things a bit with a better instruction set and more stable core.
The best thing was the Celeron 300A, I had one. Easily clocked to 450mhz with 128k ondie cache not slot cache. Back in those days, an overclock over 100mhz was extremely huge without special cooling. That Celeron was quicker at 450mhz than $500 Pentiums so we were quite excited with it back in those days.
It was basically an experiment in design and cooling IMO. I think Intel thought by moving the processor off the board and onto a "daughterboard" that this would reduce heat on the board, which it did, but I think it caused other problems, and they went back to the old CPU socket style with later models of the Pentium 3 and later (as some earlier/older Pentium 3's and Celerons were slotted, but newer ones were on the main board via a regular socket). In fact, I just found (in a box) an old Pentium II processor I have been holding onto for historical sake.
On the same topic of computer modularity, do a google search for Razer's "Project Christine" ... and RUclips also has videos of Razer showing it off during some conventions, in the past.
The CPU module would not be a card, but it is similar in that it is a module that can be swapped in/out.
00:39 The Pentium Pro's on-package cache ran at the CPU speed, not half the CPU speed. The Pentium II, which moved cache from the CPU package to a daughter board, accessed that cache at half the CPU speed.
Like! The first Celeron had zero L2 cache but the Celeron Mendocino released only 4 months after the first Celeron, had 128 MB L2 cache at full speed. The Celeron Mendocino was because of this just as fast as a Pentium 2 ar the same frequency and FSB. The Celeron and Celeron Mendocino were also the overclocking Kings of that period, the 266-333 mhz versions being able to overclock by 50% simply by raising the FSB from 66 to 100. The Celeron Mendocino 300 mhz, at a price of 149 $, could be overclocked to 450 mhz (4.5x100) and perform just as fast as the fastest CPU on the market, the Pentium 2 450 (4.5x100) at a price of 669 $, both CPUs being released in the same day 24 August 1998.
They looked so cool, those cartridge CPU's back in the day :D the adverts for Pentium MMX, Pentium II all the way to Pentium 4 were epic, nothing like that in more recent history.
Wow. I forgot this existed until I saw it. I remember a company I worked IT for (a while back) purchased new machines with these in them. We were curious about it and just figured this was how they would come from then on.
the last image is funny with the Apple ad showing a Pentium chip on a snail.
Little did they know only a few years into the 2000s, Apple would be using Intel CPUs.
On a side note I always called these "Nintendo Processors" because the went in like an SNES game. It was easier than saying "Slot 1" and then having to explain that Slot 1 CPUs are the ones that pop in like an SNES game.
David Kearns oddly enough now everyone wants to use Amd... And that was before rysen
* socket 370 celerons and some later slot 1 celerons have 128kb of on-die L2 cache, making it faster in most games then a pentium II. Alltough the latter had 4x the L2 cache, it was on cartridge and ran at half clock speed, making it slower then the celeron in most games.
I used to work at Intel at that time inspecting those PIII. We got to check thousands a day!
The coolest card was the Celeron 300A, because you could OC them from 300 to 450 MHz even with the most ridiculous standard heat sinks, which was fantastic for the money...
The later celerons (Medocino's) had L2 cache - the differences between the Celeron 300 vs 300"A" where the cache was printed on die with 128kb of L2. It was very good when you overclocked it up to 450Mhz which matched the P2-450's for most gaming operations. These were the golden days of overclocking when they easily got 50% better speeds with enough cooling.
I remember buying a P3 500MHz cartridge (fastest available and passive cooling to boot) in the late '90s when my AMD Athlon 1.3GHz failed (bad batch, my Dad's and brother's failed a few months later). Windows 95 ran ok on it, but when I installed Linux I was able to play full screen DivX which even the aforementioned Athlon 1.3GHz wasn't able to do in Windows 95/98 without framedropping. Ahh memories.
The other reason for secc processors to exist was the space they took up. Secc cpu's had much better cooling because they had a large rectangular heat sink as opposed to the normal square heat sink that came with other cpu's. I'm not so sure the cache has anything to do with it since Amd had competing secc cartridges too.
One problem that was fairly common, Amd's version was wired the opposite to Intel's, so if you bought a "slot one" or "slot A" motherboard you were in for a rude awakening if you stuck your processor in the wrong type of board and blew up the cpu. I actually came across a few old computers that people were getting rid of, forgetting why they didn't work in the first place, to find a Intel cpu installed in an Amd board or vice-versa.
The Pentium Pro had full speed L2 cache of 256k , 512k or 1028k (1 meg) The chip was super expensive to make and was king in the server world for a few years. IBM PC's cost about 2500 to 3800 dollars each with a pentium pro and were used by servers and banking too often with NT4. The IBM 365 6589 machines I ran here were used for about a decade, they had usb in a mother board from 1996. With Windows 2000 the top configuration I used for Photoshop was two 333 Mhz Xeon overdrive server cpus with the max 512 megs of EDO ram. The box was really actually good for gaming in that the games used dual processors eons ago. One odd server motherboard I once used from 1996 would hold 1 Gig of ram, 8 sticks of 128megs. it was killer for photoshop and big files when most folks were playing with 64megs. The ram was bloody hell expensive, a grand or more for the ram. Pentium Pro never had MMX buy II often did. The 333Mhz Pentium Socket 8 Overdrive CPU was once 1000 bucks in Beta then 599 list when it came out to the public. Socket 8 is the giant Pentium Pro socket. There were some oddball Socket 8 to Celeron 533 Mhz aftermarket gizmos sold but none of mine would work long term, the Computer would lock up at the worst time. :) Pentium Pro never really took off in the Home market because it really did not benefit much with Win 95/98/98SE; But with NT3.51/NT4/Win2000 the CPU's features were really used.
6 years later I am suggested this video. Thanks, better late than never ey!
When i was a kid i got our old family computer from my parents. The pc had a pentium 2 (233mhz). My father soon found another pc in a trash bin somwhere and brought it home which didnt work and i looked inside and there was a processor. Curiously i carefully took it out and saw it was a pentium 2 (333mhz). 100 mhz more than my current. Then one day i decided to try and put it in my pc no idea how to do anything really hardware wise but it fit then i started the pc on and i could now run diablo 2 lod and other games without lag. It was an incredible experience for me then and i will never forget this cpu.
I remember getting a slot 1 Celeron 300A at 300MHz, and overclocking it to 450MHz. To this day I generally prefer the unlocked multiplier processors, even if I don't overclock them I like knowing that I can.
Yeah I had an Athlon, on a card. They looked awesome. Now we are back to pins, 20 years later.
They made slot L2 celeron's also. The old Xeon's and itanium's were like this too but much taller.
Very interesting. I had a double slot motherboard with two of the card based Celerons.
Must have been a powerhouse
These are amazing machines that people use all the time when they had a tough time early on in history and they can't make it through Windows 10 and all the events that take place. The best part about these is that they interface with all the children's equipment so if you have a serial connection or even an old expansion card it will work, plus you can put in a top Pentium III and have Netflix and chill whenever the server is on with Vista. It has no NX-bit so it can't run adult software but I would say if you were to put one in a box and plug it in either via USB or PCI-e ribbon cable make sure that it is ready to get hot because requests from real computers can make it work very hard!
I remember my AMD Athlon Slot processor. It was 700Mhz but I bought something called a Gold Finger Device (GFD) from the back pages of a pc mag and I was able to overclock the processor to 1000Mhz. Because I no longer had the casing on on the processor I used to hold the heatsink on with velcro :D
I almost kind of wish they could use this type of card edge board again, I'm sure they would be inefficient for a number of reasons, but installing them and pulling them out made them pretty idiot proof and resilient. No need to worry about accidentally bending pins or screwing up the PGA on the motherboard.
Intel went with Slot 1 because it was easier to patent protect and thus exclude pin compatible drop-in off brand chips as were rampant throughout the Socket 5 and 7 eras. Since Slot 1 there have been no off brand Pentiums.
I've read somewhere that the early cacheless slot 1 Celerons were made from discarded P2's that had cache failures during testing, so they apparently had their cache removed or disabled and Intel was still able to package them up and sell them
+Infinitrium Same as for the 486sx, wich was a cache failed dx
+Bravo's retro the sx was actually a dx with a missing, or disabled math coprocessor.
I remember having a Celeron running at 733 mhz. (it was contemporary to the Pentium 3), and while it was a socketed chip of some kind, it came with a card edge adapter for the card based systems.
Quite an ungainly looking arrangement, but it worked well enough...
I still remember when my father gave me some awesome gifts for my BDay which included a Pentium III 933EB Mhz SECC format and a Nec Multisync 95 19 inches CRT monitor back in early 2000's. It'd be like a kiddo receives today(in 2020) an AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, 16-Core, 32-Thread CPU and a ASUS ROG Strix XG438Q 43" 3840 x 2160 4K gaming monitor. Yes, they were as expensive as top of the line CPU/Monitors are today. Quake III arena and Unreal tournament tests were used back then to determine whether a CPU was good for gaming or not.
I remember when I go into my grandfather's storage room, I saw a PC with a slotted CPU and I was hyped thinking it was a GPU, when I realize the slot isn't compatible, I was utterly disappointed.
There were also Slot 1 Pentium IIIs.
The dismantled beige beast across my bedroom right now has one that appears to be dead.
Actually none of the arguments made in the video sound too convincing for a design that was not only greatly inconvenient but kinda impractical too (due to cooling and other issues). Thus I still think that the sole purpose was the contemporary rumor that this was Intel's attempt to push AMD out of its motherboard designs.
Only the Celeron A series lacked cache. After that batch, Intel started putting 128 L2 cache on the die itself (which, naturally, ran at core speed). Of course, they kept you on a crippled bus by limiting you to a 66 MHz FSB, so overall, it still ran a bit slower than an equivalently clocked Pentium II.
Cache levels don't skip a level, they go in sequence always, just like pillars in a car. You can't have a car with an A pillar and a C pillar, it's an A pillar and B pillar. Likewise, motherboard cache isn't L3 cache just because, it's L3 if and only if there's L1 and L2 on the CPU. If the CPU has only one level of cache, that is the L1 cache, and the slower mobo cache is L2. If the CPU has _no_ cache, then the mobo cache is the only level, and we just call it "cache". No need to call it "L1" because there's no other level.
Cache on the motherboard became commonplace on the PC with the 486, that had no cache in the CPU. The SRAM cache wasn't typically called "cache", it was called "SRAM" or "tag RAM". SRAM originally came as DIP packages that plugged into sockets on the motherboard. There were 9 DIP chips (one for parity) for the 32-bit data path, presumably with each chip being 4 bits wide. Otherwise any gain from having SRAM would be lost by narrowing the bus to only 8 bits! Later versions had a SMD chip soldered onto the motherboard.
I had an early Pentium motherboard with SRAM sockets, but by that time, most motherboard cache was pre-installed. P5 chips didn't need motherboard cache to work, just as '486 chips didn't need SRAM, but having it improved performance. The P5 had only one cache on-die, so the motherboard cache was L2. The P6 (Pentium Pro) had L1 and L2 on-die, and AFAIK no motherboard cache, as L2 was pretty exotic back then. IIRC motherboard cache topped off at 512K because that's all that the bus and DRAM speeds of the time could make use of. That changed with the K6-III that had 256K of L2 cache on-die, and a 100 MHz bus. Prior to that, the maximum PC clock speed remained stuck at 66 MHz from the '486 through the PPro. The K6-III would work on a regular Socket 7 motherboard with 512K of mobo cache, but could use 1 MiB of mobo cache to challenge PII and PIII processors at much less cost.
Intel had problems putting their next-gen Coppermine CPUs into production, and the K6-III dominated during that time. The then-new Xeon modules offered modest performance increases, but were gigantic and costly, and only supported by the top-end chipsets. At work I used Compaq ProLiant machines with dual PII and PIII CPUs mostly. The added cost and size of the Xeon wasn't worth it for file and print, and most other services. Although we had a couple of 4-way systems, and one 8-way, the small performance increases couldn't justify the massive price per unit. We found that we could deploy two 2-way SMP machines in a Citrix farm, and get better performance than one 4-way machine that cost much more.
I would not be surprised to see a return of edge card CPU package with a water block on each side for cooling. This would also reduce the ammount of condensation the mother board is exposed to.
Celeron 300a was the fastest chip of the Pentium 2 era. It had 128k level 1 cache and could be overclocked to 450mhz and it ran faster than 400mhz pentium 2s.
They should bring this idea back but for GPUs. Put the GPU on a card with a 256 bit wide buss and have it share motherboard RAM with the CPU. Motherboard RAM is slower so instead of rendering to an external framebuffer they could put a small chunk of on-die memory in the CPU and have it render the scene in tiles. This technology is already mature, it's how AMD's Xbox One GPU works and Microsoft has the DirectX code to manage shared memory between the CPU and GPU already and could just port it to the desktop version of windows. It would also make multi GPU rendering easier and more efficient because you only have to allocate every other tile to a different GPU. A quad channel memory buss would have plenty of bandwidth for this type of shared memory architecture and because there is no longer any memory needed on the graphics card dual GPU cards would probably have a similar cost to a single GPU card with 8 gigs of DDR5 does now.
Mendocino-core Celerons and other Socket 370 Celerons had L2 cache, and could also be OC'd to compete with chips higher up the line at the time, IIRC.
Seen those a few times in IT environments and thought they were pretty neat. Great explanation!
You forgot to mention the Celeron 300A. The Celeron 300 was an absolute disaster, so Intel re-released the Celeron with an on-die 128Kb L2 cache that ran at bus speed. In turn, clock for clock, it matched the P2 300 in benchmarks, and once overclocked to 450Mhz, it often beat the best P2 450 in the market. Nearly every 300a is able to overclock to 450Mhz. This was the true hero of the slot Intel CPU generation.
Maybe you can make an issue about famous overclocking and hardware modification. The era you are covering had some remarkable overclock potential CPUs, such as the famous MMX 166MHz which were often capable of 250MHz+ without any special binning, which is more than 50% extra clock. Or should I mention the Abit BP6, which allowed running two Celerons in dual. One limitation of Celerons were (besides mutilated cache) is that they were not supposed to be in multi CPU systems. Abit BP6, some motherboards defied that.
Well these CPU cartridges looked awesome back then and I kinda wish I had one (I went straight to the Athlon Thunderbird in August 2000), but it was a band-aid solution. Just be glad L2 and L3 caches are integrated and much, much faster these days.
Ah those were the days. I used a K6-2 400 with 3D now! (ha!) for my games rig, but my second machine was a Celeron 300A. The A had a full 128kb Cache on the CPU itself, so it ran at full speed. It also overclocked very well, though I never overclocked mine as CPU's were expensive. Still are :)
I had the P2 266 and yeah I went for a 300A system after that.
Those were great machines, got sold on when upgrading.