Return To Castle Intel: 16 Years Of Motherboard History
Return To Castle Intel: 16 Years Of Motherboard HistoryLast month, we took you deep into the hidden recesses of Intel’s Hawthorn Farm facility, where the company’s enthusiast motherboards are designed and refined. On our way out of the building, we walked down a long hallway that ends with the metal detector gate one passes through when entering the building. This hallway is lined with dozens of mounted, framed motherboards—a veritable walk-through museum documenting Intel’s many years of motherboard innovation.
As tech enthusiasts, we tend to be amnesiacs. There’s just so much good stuff to focus on now, and even better stuff coming soon, that we forget where we’ve been and the massive effort that went into moving through those stages. Walking this hallway, we felt a bit like archeologists or perhaps sudden visitors to the Galapagos Islands, granted a rare glimpse at the sweep of natural evolution. Some fits of creativity grew into the technologies we have today. Others blossomed for a moment and died ingloriously.
At the end of our last visit, we got about half-way down this hallway, then stalled in our tracks. After nearly two decades in the hardware business, it was impossible not to stop at each frame with a “I remember that!” or a “Oh, what was that called again?!” We wanted to stay for hours. So on a return visit with a camera and tripod, we did. Sure, we had to shoot the boards under poor lighting and through the high-glare glass of their frames, but it turned out well in the end.
What follows are our picks for the best dozen of the mobo brood, the ones that stood out as having exceptional historical significance. We had a blast taking this walk down memory lane and rediscovering our roots. Hopefully, you will, too.
The Skulltrail had similar results, offering very little performance gains over single socket systems while costing and arm and a leg to build and run.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-skulltrail-part-3,1770-25.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/brute-force-quad-cores,1371-13.html
EX:
-AGP came from the LX chipset not the BX
-PII starting clock where 233Mhz and 266Mhz
-FX chipset had not cache on the board it was on the slot with the CPU
actually the 233Mhz had a really strange cache mem divider that gave it really slow cache access compared to the 266Mhz variant if memory serv well?
Jon,
You're right about the chipset--the LX was, in fact, first with AGP.
I believe the author was referring to 100 MHz bus models--clarified that.
I believe you're incorrect about the 430LX, though--it did support onboard pipelined burst cache memory.
As for the drop-down menu, it appears on all reviews. However, you can navigate through picture stories using the little boxes up top, which also give you a preview of each page before you click.
Thanks, and all the best.
Chris
You're correct that some slot 1 boards did offer onboard pipelined cache. Often it was an add on option with its own socket but some definitely did have soldered in out of the box.
I may yet learn something here? Seing as the L2 cache on slot 1 CPUs was on the sloted card itself did this soldered on cache on the motherboard become L3 or was it just deactivated?
I do remember this option on the socket 5-6-7 motherboards. Some super 7 motherboard went a far as 1mb cache with depending on the CPU would be L2 or L3 cache.
isn't the fan for the chipset and not the processor?
Adding on additional cache onto these motherboards created an L3 cache. It was really just a luxury with little performance boost in desktop markets. Its effect may have been more profound with server boards. Either way, most motherboard manufacturers never bothered to include additional L3 cache or at best the L3 expansion slot.
The heatsink with the fan is for the chipset and not the processor. The Atom processor is actually under the smaller heatsink to the left.
P5 (Pentium 1) Designs had the L2 cache integrated into the motherboard and was accessed via the FSB rather then a sort of "back side bus" like the pentium 2's etc and NO P2's didnt have any cache on the motherboard, but the L2 was integrated on the cpu "package", this time directly accessed etc (but at a 1:2 ratio), this was only done because it wasnt cost effective at the time to integrate the cache into the cpu die/package (like the P6/Pentium Pro).
L3 expansion slot? your talking about the "COAST" slots on a P5 based motherboard, right? They dont exist on P6 based motherboards
That AUX power connector, i doubt any system listed here based on the P5's and P6's ever used anywhere near 250w, and you can find a far more modern motherboard even as far as the original Pentium 4 socket 423 with that connector or similar - iv seen them from ASUS (P4T??) and other OEM's - even in Dell's.
Interesting side note i have used a Pentium 1 with 1gb of ram (Gigabyte GA-5AA, 2x512 SDR PC133), and Pentium Pro's with 256mb EDO etc, still got working samples of most Socket 5/7 CPU's (AMD, IBM/Cyrix, IDT, Intel etc) - the last socket shared by everyone!
Are you sure you don't have the hijack on your end? I have no such problem with the site.
The original PC's with 8086 and 8088 processors could be overclocked in various ways. I remember some kind of add-on product for the IBM PC that upped the clock speed. I went to the local CompUSA (the original one!) to buy one and they told me it was a crappy product and talked me out of it. I remember various clone computers that upped the clock speed to 6 and 8MHz.