Xeon L2 cache question ...

[Giovanni Azua]

Hi all,

I have already made the purchase a month ago and now I
realized that I didn't pay attention or gave enough importance
to the amount of L2 cache memory included in my Dual Xeon
system. I just wanted to have as much Ghz as possible ...

The question is, is it better/faster:

- Dual Xeon 3.0Ghz L2 2MB

or

- Dual Xeon 3.2Ghz L2 1MB

TIA,
Best Regards,
Giovanni

 

[Alex]

Hi all,

I have already made the purchase a month ago and now I
realized that I didn't pay attention or gave enough importance
to the amount of L2 cache memory included in my Dual Xeon
system. I just wanted to have as much Ghz as possible ...

The question is, is it better/faster:

- Dual Xeon 3.0Ghz L2 2MB

or

- Dual Xeon 3.2Ghz L2 1MB

I don't have any hard evidence for you at the moment, but my money would
be on the 3 Ghz model with 2 MB of L2 cache. Last time I read an article
on CPU architecture, L2 cache seemed to play a more important role for
Intel CPUs than AMD (probably due to the location of the memory
controller). A Xeon with more L2 cache would be better at hiding the
latency associated with memory access; this would probably be more
noticeable than an extra 200 MHz of clock speed. However, I'm not
entirely sure about this. And the increase in performance, which ever
way it leans, probably wouldn't amount to very much. Either of those
Xeons should purr along quite nicely.

Alex

 

[Derek Baker]

I don't have any hard evidence for you at the moment, but my money would
be on the 3 Ghz model with 2 MB of L2 cache. Last time I read an article
on CPU architecture, L2 cache seemed to play a more important role for
Intel CPUs than AMD (probably due to the location of the memory
controller). A Xeon with more L2 cache would be better at hiding the
latency associated with memory access; this would probably be more
noticeable than an extra 200 MHz of clock speed. However, I'm not entirely
sure about this. And the increase in performance, which ever way it leans,
probably wouldn't amount to very much. Either of those Xeons should purr
along quite nicely.

Alex

I think the difference between AMD and Intel on L2, is the much bigger L1 on
the Athlons. Increasing the L2 cache didn't make much difference on the
Athlon XPs, and they didn't have the onboard memory controller.