What was wrong with it?

[unrealman]

is it just me or did amd hate the cartige desighn? i mean they stopped using it and went back to the socket REALLY fast didn't they? i mean they had a few athlons that were cartige and now they like don't even make those processors anymore. sup wit dat????

[krusty the klown]

Praps, like Inhell, they wanted to get away from the relatively expensive cartridge and use sockets. The original reason for the bulky slot 1 design was to accomodate the separate L2 cache chips and with the advent of 'on-die' L2 cache, the whole package could fit on to a smaller, cheaper socket arrangement.

It is a pain in the *rse when the designs change like the wind - nobody likes to throw away a perfectly good mobo to upgrade a CPU - this is the wonderful thing about slockets: they let you upgrade Slot1 systems so easily and I'm sure AMD Slot A owners would appreciate something similar!

[Undertow]

The slot, or cartridge as you called it, was just a quick fix to keep the CPU's cool. The reason we're back to socket is because they managed to put the die above the ceramic pin holder, allowing the cooling device to be placed directly on the core. Slots are actually slower, due to the fact that the processor is farther away from the motherboard. That's the reason on-die cache is so good, because it is closer to the processor (in it, actually) so it can send and recieve information faster. This puts the processor close to everything and is the ideal way to mount a processor. AMD and Intel wanted to churn out faster processors sooner so they were forced to make them slot style.