Why Were Pentium 2's on Cards? [Byte Size] | Nostalgia Nerd

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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Nikon D3200 with 40mm Macro
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♜Resources♜
Pentium 2 images courtesy of Wikipedia/Wikimedia and public domain imagery.
Information courtesy of "The Complete PC Upgrade & Maintenance Guide, Ninth Edition" by Mark Minasi.

[matthewbanta]

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.

[Etchyboy]

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.

[GeFeldz]

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.

[jdla]

Does anyone remember the "slocket" adapters that let you put a normal CPU in a SECC mobo?

[tdrewman]

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.

[louistournas]

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.

[argoneum]

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

[sergheiadrian]

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.

[hurricane]

And years after, I still automatically translate "Celeron" to "Garbage"

[DerrickRG]

Some Pentium III CPUs were slotted too.

[RamjetX]

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.

[MakoRuu]

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

[TheLoveMario]

Pfft, who the hell would play Quake in high resolution? 320x240p all the way.

[yorgle]

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.

[djmchls]

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)

[xirabolt]

>one thousand twenty four kilobytes
>half-megabyte

Why are we switching orders of magnitude in the same sentence?

[yushatak]

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..?

[securi-t]

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.

[diablomix]

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.

[Meekerextreme]

Damn, this brings back memories. I had a Micron PC Pentium Pro 200