Return To Castle Intel: 16 Years Of Motherboard History
You’d think that our first Intel board code-named for a place might have been Santa Clara, Hillsboro, Portland, or some other major Intel location. But no. The first quarter of 1998 brought us Seattle, Intel’s first board to make it to a 100 MHz front-side bus (FSB). This was also the company’s time-to-market board for supporting the Pentium II launch. Hmmm, where is that CPU socket? Oh, right—there wasn’t one! Instead, we had the Slot 1 design supporting processor cartridge packages often informally known as “candy bars.” Launch speeds of the 100 MHz bus parts were 350 and 400 MHz.
Compared with Thor, you can see that Seattle is a cleaner board. A lot of the extra and oversized chips are vanishing. All of those real estate-sucking memory chips are gone, for instance, although 512KB of L2 cache is still on the motherboard, and large capacitors are starting to crop up like mushrooms around the CPU slot. Note again that we have a shared PCI/ISA slot, this time second in from the far edge.
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