Were slot mounted CPUs a good idea?

[4745454b]

You could get a slot CPU not to far back. Some one (Asrock?) made a board that had a S939 I think, and produced "daughter cards" for AM2, and 775. Each daughter card had the socket, and ram slots. I think Via made the northbridge which I *think* stayed on the main motherboard. This was around perhaps 2 years ago?

As already stated, the slot design was to get the L2 cache closer to the chip. Now that our manufacturering process is so small, its not really needed. Thats not to say a slot design couldn't work, as I just mentioned a "recent" example.

 

[MU_Engineer]

As already stated, the slot design was to get the L2 cache closer to the chip. Now that our manufacturering process is so small, its not really needed. Thats not to say a slot design couldn't work, as I just mentioned a "recent" example.

The slot design was to cheaply/b] get off-die L2 cache closer to the chip. The Pentium Pro was the first Intel x86 processor to have L2 cache that wasn't mounted on the motherboard and it used a socket (the funky-looking oblong Socket 8 with two pin pitches.) The Pentium Pro had the cache chips in the CPU package with the die via an MCM and hooked the L2 cache and the core over a backside bus. The problem with that approach is that it was much more expensive than putting third-party SRAM chips on a daughter card, so Intel went the cheaper daughter card route until they had a process node suitable to put a sufficient quantity of L2 cache on-die- and voila- Socket 370 was born.

AMD was a little bit of a different case as they made socketed processors with onboard L2 cache about the same time they did slotted CPUs. The K6-2+ and the K6-III/K6-III+ had onboard L2 cache and were socket 7 while AMD also rolled out Slot A Athlons with off-die L2. Supposedly AMD went the slotted route because Slot A was their first interface not compatible with Intel CPUs and Slot A is simply Slot 1 turned 180 degrees with different pinouts, letting motherboard manufacturers easily make Slot A boards without needing any AMD-specific parts.

 

[caamsa]

You could get a slot CPU not to far back. Some one (Asrock?) made a board that had a S939 I think, and produced "daughter cards" for AM2, and 775. Each daughter card had the socket, and ram slots. I think Via made the northbridge which I *think* stayed on the main motherboard. This was around perhaps 2 years ago?

As already stated, the slot design was to get the L2 cache closer to the chip. Now that our manufacturering process is so small, its not really needed. Thats not to say a slot design couldn't work, as I just mentioned a "recent" example.

Ahhh yes I have two of those boards with one of them having the expansion upgrade board for an AM2 CPU. It works great!