Yeah... Back in the day, as another comment mentioned, the PPro had a 'chiplet' style configuration where The CPU and Cache were on the same chip but separate

Yeah... Back in the day, as another comment mentioned, the PPro had a 'chiplet' style configuration where The CPU and Cache were on the same chip but separate dies. The problem with this was the CPU and Cache had to be bonded to the chip first, then tested, and if either was bad, game over. Additionally, at the time die size was at more of a premium, in the case of a PPro, 256Kb of cache was close-ish to 2/3 the size of the CPU die. [0] The P2, Katmai P3, and the Athlon 'Classic' (Pluto/Orion) used offboard cache; This was far better from a yield standpoint (I'm assuming the cache chips could either be tested before install, or were easier to rework) but limited their speed. It's crazy to think that the Katmai P3 itself had around 9.5 Million Transistors, but the 512Kb of cache was another 25 Million on it's own! [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro#/media/File:Pentiumpro_moshen.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro#/media/File:Pentiu...