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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Joan Osland Graffius who wrote (68777)10/7/1999 12:19:00 PM
From: TREND1  Respond to of 132070
 
Joan
At .18 L2 cache can be put into Intel chip, but
pure memory is just to big yet, meaning it gives off too
much heat. Some day every thing will be just "one chip",
but that is not for years and years.
Larry Dudash



To: Joan Osland Graffius who wrote (68777)10/7/1999 12:22:00 PM
From: TREND1  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 132070
 
Joan
One more thing, some one related how every big jump in
Intel's processors & Memory has resulted in bugs and delays.
If any one knows a system other then Rambus for advaced memory, please let us know.
Larry Dudash



To: Joan Osland Graffius who wrote (68777)10/7/1999 12:56:00 PM
From: benwood  Read Replies (2) | Respond to 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.