L3 cache. What could it buy us?

[nomadicus]

All P4's and many Xeon's (and AMD?) chips only have an L1 and L2 cache. Of the Xeons that have L3 cache, some now have an L3 cache of 1MB. A review is here.

For discussion purposes what is the potential for prime95 with and without it being modified to take advantage of the L3 cache?

[Xyzzy]

To be honest, even if it was two times faster it still wouldn't be a good buy...

A while ago I ran some benchmarks using Mlucas on several Suns... They ranged from 256KB L2 to 8MB L2... The 8MB ones ran faster but not a lot faster...

The way I look at it is no matter how much faster CPUs get, we'll *always* be up against the wall looking for performance because the numbers just get bigger and bigger...

One of my recurring dreams is travelling back in time to 1997 with a 3.2GHz P4 and Prime95 23.5 and using that instead of the P133 I had back then... :D

BTW, the new Pentium-M has a 1MB L2... Too bad it doesn't do well with Prime95...

[E_tron]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

...One of my recurring dreams is travelling back in time to 1997 with a 3.2GHz P4 and Prime95 23.5 and using that instead of the P133 I had back then... :D

I've always wanted to go far into the future and bring back that fastest silicon base computer with .05u manufacture. Sure, v23.6 wouldn’t be optimized for the cpu, but the sheer speed would put us on top overnight .
My old Signature: "Behold the power of E"(after the cheese commercials) 8) .

[nomadicus]

Originally Posted by E_tron

I've always wanted to go far into the future and bring back that fastest silicon base computer with .05u manufacture.

50nm (ummm, rather45nm) fabs may not be too many years from now considering 65nm is slated for 2005. 45nm won't be "far" behind that.