In keeping with the 10 years of podcasting celebrations we decided to do another virtual unboxing, not of a new product but one from the Hardware Asylum Permanent Archives and what will be the first product featured in a new Hardware Asylum YouTube Series dedicated to the Hardware Archives.
The board featured in this Podcast is an Intel VS440FX designed for the Pentium Pro Socket 8 processors. This was a retail motherboard supporting processors up to a 512KB cache and is also one of the base model editions without an onboard sound card.
What is great about the motherboard and processor platform is that while the design was short lived it was well ahead of its time by putting the processor cache on the CPU instead of on the motherboard. This allowed for faster reads and writes to the cache module and increased its overall performance. Sadly since it was designed for 32Bit operating systems unless you were running Windows NT or Windows NT4 it actually ran slower than the current Pentium processors on the market.
When Pentium II hit the market it was all over for Pentium Pro. The new Pentium II offered the same on chip cache but ran at half the clock speed which was still faster than current Pentium chips and matched performance of the Pentium Pro even in Windows NT due to higher clock speeds.
The great thing about Pentium Pro is that while Intel hadn’t quite figured out how to make on chip cache work it was the future and paved the way for what the Pentium 3 would eventually become.
Episode 119 featured music:
Little People - Start Shootin' (http://www.littlepeoplemusic.com/)
