L3 Cache

Does anyone remember the K6-3? with the L3 cache onboard, now there was a processor that ran hot.

Because this processor had the L2 cache on the processor it had a L3 cache on the motherboard. I personally think it would be cool if AMD used the same idea with the athlon, but would it really increase performance.

Personally I think all motherboards should come with some basic ram in the system, hard wired to the motherboard but that runs faster than the ram in the slots. In other words they could include high quality ram that runs at the speed of the FSB but it is DRAM. Therefore you get better than normal ram performance but you get less performance than the cache.

64 MB would be really nice to see.

But anyway what is your opinions on this?
Bring back L3 cache or any other ideas you think could or should be implemented?

Come on reply!

Micron developed a chipset for the Athlon with L3 cache, but it never made it to market.

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L3 cache just doesn't help much with the modern memory subsystems on x86 machines. Certain machines like Apple's PowerMac do have an L3 cache due to the very slow memory subsystem (PC133 SDR SDRAM). However, with DDR SDRAM and RDRAM solutions available for the memory subsystem, an L3 cache really doesn't make much sense. It'll be expensive to implement and could cause more compatibility problems further on as processors are upgraded.