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Politics : Ask Michael Burke
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To: Joan Osland Graffius who wrote (68777)10/7/1999 12:56:00 PM
From: benwood  Read Replies (2) of 132070
 
Joan, Larry is right, memory solely on the chip for a standard PC is a looong ways off.

Around 1992 my '386 had an L2 cache of 128KB and my main memory was 4MB.

Now a Pentium 3 has 32KB of L1 cache and 512KB of L2 cache, or about 4x what was common 8 years ago, and typical systems have 64-128MB of RAM, or about 16-32x what was common 8 years ago. Also, common OS's now use virtual memory which can up the commonly useable memory to 200-400MB or more. So the trend this decade has been for external RAM capacity to grow much more quickly than on-chip (i.e. cache) memory. This is primarily for cost versus performance tradeoffs -- additional cache yields diminishing gains with increasing costs compared to adding RAM and/or faster disk drives.
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