Barton Cache

[andrewbadlose]

The barton increase in cache should help alot since every time the cpu misses a instruction that is not in the cache it has to go to main memory limiting the speed of your computer to the speed of your memory. My 2 cents, i asked my older brother about it a senior software engineir for spark chips.

<A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/andrewbadlose/specs.jpg" target="_new">Computer Specs</A>

 

[imgod2u]

The Athlons don't suffer much from branch mispredict or cache misses, so I don't think it'll help much at all. But hey, you never know.

 

[eden]

It helped mostly for P4s due to the large pipeline.
But yeah you never know, cache might be something the Athlon needs. It will surely help in Office apps, which is what made the NW win in it and not Willamette.

--
Intel and AMD sitting under a tree, P-R-O-C-E-S-S-I-N-G!

 

[IIB]

Sparc, not Spark. heh.
well its only an addition of cache, so the preformance improvement should be less dramatic.



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[bront]

It will surely help in Office apps

Yeah, my 1600+ doesn't run word fast enough for me

English is phun.

 

[IIB]

but Athlon does suffer more when it has a cache miss and needs to go to main memory which in the Athlons case slower then the Pentium 4s memory.

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[imgod2u]

Not entirely correct. The Athlon has a memory subsystem (SDRAM) that has lower latency than comparable P4 systems (with RDRAM that is). Cache misses usually pertain to data that is small in size (less than 256KB) but need to be accessed quickly. In such a case, I think the lower latency of the Athlon's memory subsystem is actually better than comparable bandwidth monsters like the P4's RDRAM memory subsystem. The reason the P4 is capable of taking advantage of the huge bandwidth yet not suffer as much from the latency is due to the prefetch feature. More cache helps more things to be prefetched and latency would have less of an effect. The Athlon already has a low-latency memory subsystem, what it doesn't have is a high-bandwidth memory subsystem in which to prefetch data from into the larger cache, so that's another reason why the extra cache really wouldn't help much (at least, that's what I expect).

 

[Kemche]

Yeah, my 1600+ doesn't run word fast enough for me

Wow, I had exact opposit experience and I only have a celeron. After excel or word is loaded I tried typing as fast as I can but the CPU is so fast, what Ever I typed, it was getting displayed as soon as I pressed the key. Sometimes I tried using big words too but there was no slowdown that I saw.

KG

"Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity." - Sarah Chambers

 

[Matisaro]

Cache misses usually pertain to data that is small in size (less than 256KB) but need to be accessed quickly. In such a case, I think the lower latency of the Athlon's memory subsystem is actually better than comparable bandwidth monsters like the P4's RDRAM memory subsystem. The reason the P4 is capable of taking advantage of the huge bandwidth yet not suffer as much from the latency is due to the prefetch feature. More cache helps more things to be prefetched and latency would have less of an effect. The Athlon already has a low-latency memory subsystem, what it doesn't have is a high-bandwidth memory subsystem in which to prefetch data from into the larger cache, so that's another reason why the extra cache really wouldn't help much (at least, that's what I expect).

Spot on, see we dont have to disagree all the time .

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[texas_techie]

gotta agree with everyone else. Extra cache doesnt help athlon that much. I suspect the extra PR numbers for barton are a hoax. I REALLY dont see cache jumping a PR number 600 points (or whatever it was).
I havnt seen, read, heard anthing ( at all ) about barton. If I do, you guys will hear about it too. Im just as interested as everyone else how it will perform.

Benchmarks are like sex, everybody loves doing it, everybody thinks they are good at it.