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Back in 1997, if you brought a Pentium 2 [1] you didn't just get a single chip with all the cache made by the same process. Instead, the chip and the cache were made by different processes, tested, then integrated into a 'cartridge' you plugged into the 'CPU slot'

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_II

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1997 was also a great time to be a Celeron owner; IIRC all you had to do was to cover one contact on the "cartridge" with nail polish, and you could trivially overclock it beyond what the much more expensive Pentium II achieved OOB. Easily kept the rig good enough for many hits that followed: StarCraft, Settlers 3, HoMM3, WA, heck even The Sims was playable.

I always thought that was a cool idea, and I was disappointed when it was essentially abandoned after the PIII. I still think there’s value there for things like customizing processors for certain applications (having a standard base chip and external interface, but being able to customize the rest of the the processor board).

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