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To: Dan3 who wrote (74596)	3/15/2002 8:27:26 AM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Dan, Hit rates will vary with code and data, but Athlon will have a substantially better hit rate than P4. Doubling the "wayness" of a cache is roughly equivalent to a 2 to 3 times size increase, so Athlon's 384K cache performs about as well as P4 with 750K to 1Meg cache. Which is probably the main reason Athlon does so well in server applications. This part is something I am a little dubious about. You mentioned that Athlon can store more locations, but given smaller total cache, each location can store less data. There may be cases when you many locations to be cached (I guess heavily multithreaded application, but there are times when you don't, and having more data sitting in the cache will be an advantage. I don't know where the trade-off is in real world applications, but my guess is in benchmarks, when usually a single task is being measured, P4 with more total L2 has an advantage. Joe

To: Dan3 who wrote (74596)	3/17/2002 6:57:09 PM
From: fyodor_	Respond to of 275872

Dan3: P4 probably doesn't scale nearly as well as Athlon, because of P4's relatively limited cache design. … At 3GHZ for P4 that becomes work 99 clocks / wait for 180 clocks... While for Athlon (at 2.33GHZ for 3000+) it's work for 130 clocks (higher hit rate) and wait for 140 clocks (since Athlon achieves its performance at a lower clock). Sorry for the delay in replying… I was unexpectedly called out of town for a few days. The upshot of this was that I got a chance to prove you wrong ;-) - not that this was my goal - I just wanted to know how Palomino and Northwood scaled - but that's what the facts say. Pure and Simple. No buts about it. Northwood scales better. For the complete details, see my post here: Message 17209774 -fyo