I'm thinking about upgrading to the intel pentium D, the 2 parallel cores seem great.

Although there's a lot of fuss over having a 1mb or a 2mb L2 cache.

My question is, how often DOES a computer fill those caches?

I'd of thought with having dual core, larger caches would be unneccesary, because the information is put straight through.

Any usefull comments appreciated.
Tnx.

Daniel Ashley-Smith
London, U.K

When it comes to 32bit apps having 2mb of L2 cache or more on a processor, the preformance diff vs 1mb of L2 cache isn't going to preform much better, but win it comes to 64bit apps that will become a whole other story. As 64bit apps advance 2mb L2 cache will help later down the road.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200
Nvidia 6800GT
SATA II 250gig 7200rpm 8mb cache
Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

Large cache = increased latency

TMP-Man

Asus A7V classic rev 1.05
Athlon XP 2100+ @ 130x17 = 2209Mhz 1.81v
768MB PC133 RAM @ 130Mhz 2-2-2
40GB 540RPM + 120GB 7200RPM HD
128MB Radeon 9500 mod 9700 @ 358/586

Ok thanks for your help, it's much appreciated.

Daniel Ashley-Smith
London, U.K

Just another quick question, my understanding of L3 caches are that they contain multiple L2 caches?

And what's the difference between an L1 and L2 cache?

I read that L2 caches are kept separate from the processor, although more more processors are including them in the architecture.

I'm guessing L2 caches are just an upgraded and much larger version of the L1 cache.

Thanks.

Daniel Ashley-Smith
London, U.K

L1 cache is built very near to the processor... Key point is to keep the cache size small so the latency will be low as well.

CPU -- L1 cache
CPU ------------------ L2 cache
3 cache (optional)
AM

When your CPU look for a piece of information, it will first look at L1 cache, only needs few clock cycles to complete... If not, then goes to bigger L2 cache, but require more clock cycle than L1 since its further away from the core... If not, then goes to the Random Access Memory to look for information... RAM is much slower than L2 cache... But the L2 cache cannot contain too much information, so the L3 cache kicks in to allow the CPU store additional information into cache to the cycle wasted in RAM will be reduced...

TMP-Man

Asus A7V classic rev 1.05
Athlon XP 2100+ @ 130x17 = 2209Mhz 1.81v
768MB PC133 RAM @ 130Mhz 2-2-2
40GB 540RPM + 120GB 7200RPM HD
128MB Radeon 9500 mod 9700 @ 358/586

"CPU -- L1 cache
CPU ------------------ L2 cache
3 cache (optional)
AM"

LOL ---- don't work so Im replacing with

CPU xx L1 cache
CPU xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx L2 cache
CPU XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX L3 cache(optional)
CPU XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX RAM

TMP-Man

Asus A7V classic rev 1.05
Athlon XP 2100+ @ 130x17 = 2209Mhz 1.81v
768MB PC133 RAM @ 130Mhz 2-2-2
40GB 540RPM + 120GB 7200RPM HD
128MB Radeon 9500 mod 9700 @ 358/586

nice information TMP-Man!

Abit NF7 ver2.0
Athlon XP 2200+ 200Mhz10.5 = 2100Mhz
DDR512 PC2700 333Mhz
Galaxy GeForce FX 5200 270/443 128MB
Windows XP SP2