This article is part of The CPU Shack’s continued partnership with guest author max1024, hailing from Belarus. I have provided some minor edits/tweaks in the translation from Belorussian to English.

If you still remember the times of the Pentium 4 running on Socket 478 with the Northwood, Prescott and Gallatin cores, then you should remember what about these processor cores were different from each other. Northwood was fast like a mountain doe due to a shorter 20-stage pipeline that allowed it to perform many operations very quickly without tremendous losses due to branch mis-predictions etc. , but inferior to Prescott frequency potential in overclocking, which in turn was as strong as a buffalo, due to twice the L2 cache memory(1M vs 512K) and finer tech process (90nm vs 130nm). But like any hoofed animal, it was not agile, to achieve the higher clock speeds its pipeline was extended to 31-stages, resulting in some cases, clock for clock out performing Northwood, But doing so at the expense of much heat.

A separate niche in the food chain was occupied by “Gallatin”, which combined the properties of the two previous iterations, a shorter 20-stage pipeline, with the high clock speed of the Prescott, but in its arsenal it also had a very formidable weapon, which was the presence of an additional L3 cache of 2 MB. The price of ownership of this “beast” was high, and in the literal sense of the word, it was equal, like any other representative of the Extreme Edition series – $ 999. I resisted this extreme processor, choosing  hero from AMD, the FX-51, which I consider to be one of the most outstanding processors of all times and peoples.

Xeon Universal Chip Analyzer by x86.fr

What could be better, cooler or faster? I’ve been looking for an answer to this question for a long time, until I became acquainted with the Intel Xeon server processors on Socket 604 and in particular with processors based on the Prescott 2M core, which have twice the cache size compared to their desktop counterparts and can run on ASUS production boards.

As everybody knows, it is the advanced desktop flagships of both processor manufacturers that originate from the server segment. So from the Opteron’s turned out the AMD Athlon FX-51, and from the Intel Xeon MP – the Pentium Extreme Edition. This parity of events has been preserved until now.

Xeon Gallatin MP

The server representatives of Intel Xeon processors on the Gallatin core are divided into two branches: Xeon MP (Gallatin) and simply Xeon (Gallatin). The differences are in the number of simultaneously supported processors in the system. So Xeon MP supported running up to four processors  usual Xeon could be installed in servers only in pairs. There is also a difference in steppings of the processor core itself. Let me remind you that the desktop version of “Gallatin” were the M0 stepping, just like the regular Intel Xeon series.

The Xeon MP line, by contrast, is based on an earlier stepping from A0 to C0. Among the representatives of M0 stepping, you can find four Xeon models (Gallatin) with 1M of L3 cache, with frequencies from 2.4 GHz to 3.2 GHz, and one model with a doubled  L3 cache to 2 MB, pretty much the same as a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. This model gave rise to the first “extreme” Pentium.

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New In Box MOS MCS6502 CPU from 1975 (Michael Steil – pagetable.com)

Today most all processors are permanently installed in their device (soldered in) or were taken from a bulk tray and installed by the OEM such as Dell or HP.  AMD has, at least with their higher end CPU’s gotten quite creative with the marking on the chip itself, and both AMD and Intel still offer some pretty amazing retail packaging for their enthusiast processors (the i9 in a dodecahedron package is pretty cool).  There was a time when almost all processors were available in retail packaging.  This was the time of physical computer shops, largely bypassed now by the Internet, where the packaging of a processor helped sell it.

I collect such New In Box (NIB) processors as they are pretty need to see the branding/marketing that went with the CPU’s of years past, and was reminded of this when I saw perhaps one of the oldest NIB CPU’s I have ever seen on Michael Steil’s pagetable.com blog.  An original MOS 6502 processor from 1975 in its original shipping box, as close to NIB as one can get.  MOS’s packaging would make Apple proud with its simplicity and design keeping everything tidy and the MCS6502 visible as soon as the box is opened (I am happy they didn’t use miserable black foam either, so the CPU is pristine after 45 years).  Even the original invoice is included.  $25 for the CPU ($118 in 2019 dollars) and $10 (nearly half the cost of the CPU ($47 in 2019)) for documentation)

Cyrix 83D87 386 FPU Bundled with Borland Quattro PRO Spreadsheet software (a big thing back in 1992)

Intel started offering retail boxed CPUs with the 8087 coprocessor.  This was really the first chip designed as a user upgrade to their PC (a new thing back then).  Before this Intel’s closest thing to a NOB was University Kits or Dev Kits for various chips/processors.  With the introduction of the PC, and the many thousands of beige box clones that followed, people themselves began buying processors and building computers for themselves at a much greater pace then before.  There was many companies making compatible processors at the time so packaging helped set them apart.  This began with upgrade products, math coprocessors for the 808x, 286 and 386 were the most common (by Intel, AMD, IIT, ULSI. Cyrix and more), but eventually processors themselves started getting the NIB treatment, Intel made OverDrive processors (still technically an upgrade product) for the 486. followed by actual Pentium CPUs in the retail box. By the late 1990’s everything from Celerons to Xeon server processors could be had in Retail box.  Buying a retail boxed Xeon for your rackmount server seems like an odd thing to do, but apparently Intel figured it would need to be done.

Quad AMD Opteron 6128s in Retail Box

Other companies such as AMD, Cyrix and VIA made NIB processors but they are much less common, and in a lot of ways more interesting.  AMD made retail Durons, Athlons, and Opterons, and in one of the most unusual things I have seen for a NIB, an actual 4-pack of Opteron 6128s (pictured). The Opteron 6128 is a 8 core Magny-Cours server processor introduced in 2009 and cost $266 each at that time.  This NIB set is dated late 2011, so would probably be a bit cheaper, but still $800 or so, and the large SWATX motherboards needed to run 4 socket G34 processors require somewhat special cases and PSU’s, but at least you can have  a half terabyte of RAM.  Inside the retail box is 4 smaller boxes, each containing an Opteron 6128 CPU, installation instructions, warranty info, and a case badge (you get 4 total case badges).  It seems this packaging was designed to support different configurations (probable a single Opteron 6128, and duals).