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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Process Boy who wrote (86095)	1/9/2000 12:09:00 AM
From: Cirruslvr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573812

PB - RE: "I wish Scumbria to quantify his position on this. In his "memory latency is the performance limiter", he has indicated that increasing cache size going forward will enhance performance characteristics." I'm sure the extra 256KB will help, but I don't expect it to help as much as the first 256KB did. Diminishing rate of return. I'm no cpu person by a few million miles, but for one who know may be able to answer - since the cache is going to be double the size and at a very high MHz, will Intel have to raise its current low latency?

To: Process Boy who wrote (86095)	1/9/2000 3:52:00 PM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1573812

PB, I wish Scumbria to quantify his position on this. I've seen data for Winstone which shows that performance improvements diminish rapidly after 256KB of cache. Going from 32KB to 256KB cache improves Winstone scores by about 50%. Going from 256KB to 512KB of cache only produces 5-10% improvement. The problem is that caches are only valuable for instructions/data that are used more than once, and not for the first time they are used. A certain percentage of the data does not come in that category, and even an infinite sized cache will not improve hit rates beyond a certain value. Nevertheless, larger caches are inevitable. Improving compiler technology and instruction sets will make better use of caches in the future. Scumbria