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

To: kash johal who wrote (94612)	2/22/2000 3:24:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572208

Kash, two cores on one chip can take advantage of the huge amount of BSB bandwidth (relative to FSB bandwidth). With separate L2 caches, two CPUs operating on the same set of data will have to keep their L2 caches coherent with each other. This takes up FSB bandwidth. But with a single L2 cache, you don't have to keep two copies of the data set. Both CPUs can operate on one set in one cache. This allows for greater scalability than with two separate CPUs. Tenchusatsu

To: kash johal who wrote (94612)	2/22/2000 3:28:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 1572208

In addition to what T. replied, a unified cache, versus the same space split between two cores, actually gives you some benefit when you only got one active thread using CPU, which is not going to be uncommon, given the code base. Cheers, Dan.

To: kash johal who wrote (94612)	2/26/2000 1:25:00 AM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572208

Kash, re:"L2 cache would be shared" Why is that? Is there no gain in having 2 completely seperate cores on chip. Might it not obviate the need for software support as win2K already supports dual cpu's? If its a dumb question just say so. I did some more thinking about this. If the L2 cache on Thumper is really a victim cache, then sharing would not make any sense. Two complete dies would be the better solution. It was definitely not a dumb question. ;^) Scumbria