[geeks] squeaking away....

Greg A. Woods woods at weird.com
Tue Apr 16 14:51:59 CDT 2002


[ On Tuesday, April 16, 2002 at 14:22:45 (-0500), Bill Bradford wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] squeaking away....
>
> On Tue, Apr 16, 2002 at 03:20:43PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > > Where did you find a P-III without L2 cache?
> > Do you all 256KB "cache"?!?!?!?!?  For what!?!?!?!?
> > "lack of" == "not enough"
> 
> Jeez you people are SPOILED.

Aren't you the guy running on the nice UltraSPARC with a big cache?  ;-)

What really sucks is comparing a P-III with a P-II.  Until you fork out
the bucks for the Xenon (and the new motherboard), you're screwed for
server applications that are of any size, as in everything these days.

Even the P-III's L1 cache:

cpu0: Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) (686-class), 733.22 MHz
cpu0: I-cache 16 KB 32b/line 4-way, D-cache 16 KB 32b/line 2-way
cpu0: L2 cache 256 KB 32b/line 8-way

is really not a whole lot better than the P-II, given twice the size on
the latter:

cpu0: Intel Pentium II (Klamath) (686-class), 299.22 MHz
cpu0: I-cache 16 KB 32b/line 4-way, D-cache 16 KB 32b/line 2-way
cpu0: L2 cache 512 KB 32b/line 4-way

(8-way set associativity gives approx. 10% boost in core performance,
but it doesn't really help you hold an overall bigger working set....)

Even a P-Pro is nearly as good, and you can often upgrade it's cache
without replacing the motherboard too!

cpu0: Intel Pentium Pro (686-class), 199.35 MHz
cpu0: I-cache 8 KB 32b/line 4-way, D-cache 8 KB 32b/line 2-way
cpu0: L2 cache 256 KB 32b/line 4-way


Grrrr....  I HATE INTEL!

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>



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