It had 80 contacts on each side of a circuit board (for a total of 160), spaced 0.050' apart, plus an identification notch between contacts 42 and 43.ĬOASt modules provided either 256K or 512K of direct-mapped cache, organized as 8192 or 16384 lines of 32 bytes. The slot that the COASt module plugged into was named 'CELP', or 'card edge low profile', referring to the small circuit board and the conductors on its edge. Later, Intel combined this architecture with the CPU and created the Slot 1 CPU cartridge which contained both the CPU and separate cache chips. Intel also used the COASt standard for their Pentium systems, where it could be found as late as 1998 in Pentium MMX systems utilizing Intel chipsets such as 430VX and 430TX. It could be found in many Apple Macintosh in the early-to-mid-90s, but disappeared as the Mac moved to the PowerPC platform. The standard was originally defined by Motorola to be between 4.33 and 4.36 inches (110 and 111 mm) wide, and between 1.12 and 1.16 inches (28 and 29 mm) high. Later COASt modules were equipped with pipelined-burst SRAM. A low-cost system could run with no cache, while a more expensive system could come equipped with 512 KB or more cache. COASt modules decoupled the motherboard from its cache, allowing varying configurations to be created. These modules were somewhat popular in the Apple and PC platforms during early to mid-1990s, but with newer computers cache is built into either the CPU or the motherboard. COASt modules look like somewhat oversized SIMM modules. COASt, an acronym for ' cache on a stick', is a packaging standard for modules containing SRAM used as an L2 cache in a computer.

Elpina motherboard