>Few people here that claim to understand this stuff really do, so I would take most comments, even those from Dale LaRoy, with a grain of salt.<
Obviously, you are among those that fail to understand this stuff. For example:
>"Full Associativity" means that the "way-ness" of a cache is equal to its size. Thus, an 8KB fully associative cache will have 8192-ways.<
Full Associativity means that the wayness of a cache is equal to the number of entries, which depends upon the cache line size. If indeed, the caches being modeled here use a one byte cache line size, which is what would be needed for 8192 ways in an 8KB cache, these tables are useless.
As it is, these tables show no indication that they factor in the effect of hardware prefetch, which would dramatically change the hit rate for a 512KB L2 cache and a 1MB L2 cache with both caches having the same number of entries.
Also note that according to these tables, it isn't just a matter of 8-way being as good as fully associative. These tables actually indicate a higher hit rate with 8-way set associativity than with full associativity. Without some type of an explanation of this discrepancy, I would tend to reject this data outright. |
