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To: Ali Chen who wrote (148034)11/14/2001 12:26:35 PM
From: Win Smith  Read Replies (1) of 186894
 
Ali Chen, 20% performance gain from a 512k cache seems pretty hypothetical. Even 5-7% seems pretty hypothetical to me. Of the three listed NorthWood benchmarks at hardwaremania.com , (http://www.hardwaremania.com/reviews/athlonXP/sandra.gif
hardwaremania.com
hardwaremania.com )

Only the Sandra memory benchmark showed a (<1%) improvement for the Northwood over the production 2ghz P4. I dug up these graphs from tech-report.com which show the fairly weak scaling of Sandra memory bandwidth numbers with processor frequency; there's less than 1% gain for going from 1.8ghz to 2.0ghz with the production P4:

tech-report.com
tech-report.com

So maybe the memory system can do a little bit better prefetching with the bigger cache. But given the rather weak correlation between the P4/850 system's stellar memory bandwidth and its lackluster performance in other areas, I don't see these improvements leading to much better overall performance.

On carefully chosen benchmarks that fit in a 512k cache but not a 256 k cache, 20% or better gain is possible, I'm sure. I haven't seen any indication that there are many existing benchmarks or real world programs where that's the case, though.
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