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

To: Monica Detwiler who wrote (96556)	3/3/2000 12:33:00 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571899

Monica, Does this not imply that the new 1 GHz Athlon will be a standard Athlon with off-chip Level 2 cache? If so, won't that cache be running at only 300+ MHz - a mere one-third (or so) of the processor's 1 GHz speed? How would you expect, if this is true, the 1 GHz Athlon to perform relative to Intel's 1 GHz Coppermine - with a smaller L2 cache, but a cache that runs at the full 1 GHz? The latency of the cache is more important that the clock speed, and here is where Intel has an advantage, and higher the clock speed, the more important the latency becomes becomes. This because if the latency stays the same, and you have an L1 miss, it takes more clock cycles to deliver the data from L2. But one thing that makes it less of a problem is that Athlon L1 is 128K, compared to 32 K of CuMine. But still, AMD needs to address the latency. It will be addressed by Spitfire and Tunderbird chips. Joe

To: Monica Detwiler who wrote (96556)	3/3/2000 2:40:00 PM
From: Cirruslvr	Respond to of 1571899

Monica - RE: "If so, won't that cache be running at only 300+ MHz - a mere one-third (or so) of the processor's 1 GHz speed?" Unfortunately, that is what AMD will probably sell. "How would you expect, if this is true, the 1 GHz Athlon to perform relative to Intel's 1 GHz Coppermine - with a smaller L2 cache, but a cache that runs at the full 1 GHz?" Yeah, a CUmine 1GHz will probably be faster than a 1GHz Athlon in business apps and games. But those workstations SPEC benchmarks Tom and Anand run should be interesting. But Thunderbird will be here shortly, maybe by the time 1GHz Cumine is available in "volume" - and a 1GHz Thunderbird will easily be faster than a 1GHz Cumine.

To: Monica Detwiler who wrote (96556)	3/3/2000 4:06:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1571899

Monica - Re: "Does this not imply that the new 1 GHz Athlon will be a standard Athlon with off-chip Level 2 cache? If so, won't that cache be running at only 300+ MHz - a mere one-third (or so) of the processor's 1 GHz speed? How would you expect, if this is true, the 1 GHz Athlon to perform relative to Intel's 1 GHz Coppermine - with a smaller L2 cache, but a cache that runs at the full 1 GHz?" Excellent analysis ! IF the 1 GHz Athlon from Austin is launched, its performance will be severely degraded because of the slower L2 cache problem. And yes- the 1 GHz Coppermine should have a big advantage in this case. It would ALSO indicate that the Copper ThumperTurd from Dregs-den is NOT READY for production ! Paul