Ian, all, I was just over at the AMD thread, and saw several posts trying to trash Covington, the Pentium II without L2 cache on the cartridge. Some clever names for it were "kludge" (actually in a magazine article), brain-dead, castrated, and another one or two lovelies I forget. Note that Covington will still have L1 cache, 32 Kilobytes. Now, as I've said here before, not even mainframes had L2 until about four years ago. It's not a huge deal, not having L2. I was going to do a post like this over at AMD, but I know it would have turned into a pi**ing contest, so post here.
I read that Covington, at 266 MHz, should be about the same in performance as a Pentium 233 MMX, with decent size L2. However, it will be priced at a point low enough to allow PC's to be made to sell for $800 to $1K. Now, that's the idea, isn't it, a sub $1,000 Pentium II PC. Can't wait to get ahold of one of these and start evaluating it!
Of course, to make servers we still use Pentium Pro 200's with up to 1 Meg. L2 in the same package as the processor chip. Processing power and SMP capability are the reasons.
Tony |
