>Dale, that's quite a pessimistic view, for you to be already lowering your expectations for Clawhammer to be that of a Celeron P4 competitor, and requiring Sledgehammmer (which is later than Clawhammer, isn't it?) to compete with Prescott.<
Actually, it is both very pessimistic and very optimistic.
Except during multitasking, which most users do not do, performance increase with increasing amounts of cache level off greatly after about 384KB of 12-way set associative cache. Provided Clawhammer has 512KB of 16-way set associative L2 cache, with the same cache line size as Athlon, it should be a fairly good match for Prescott with regards to hit rate. Additionally, the shorter cache lines of Clawhammer would largely negate the bus speed advantage of P4 because they would reduce bandwidth requirements.
OTOH, if it did turn out that Clawhammer was not well equipped to take on Prescott, it should be recognized that Sledgehammer will probably have a smaller die size than Prescott, and the only reason that AMD would even need to cripple it to take it into the desktop market would be to enable them to have a Xeon priced high end variant. |
