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To: bruce rogers who wrote (635)	7/12/2000 11:47:32 PM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Bruce, Well, what's the implication of using prefetching to hide latency? This is a very complicated topic. Under ideal circumstances, prefetching can be very efficient. However, in normal operations, prefetching can have lots of unpleasant side effects. 1. Forcing needed data out of the cache. 2. Excessive bus utilization which stalls the CPU. 3. Fetching unneeded data in to the cache. The Cyrix MediaGX processor has block move instructions which are useful for the onboard graphics, but I'm dubious about the overall benefit of prefetching for most apps on Willy. Tony