Intel Corp (INTC)

[Elmer Phud]

drjohn -

Does anyone think that the rumors of Prescott having a larger L1 are credible, perhaps with a 1 Meg L2 a larger L1 begins to make a significant difference.

The L1 cache on the Northwood P4 is very fast and adding to it's size may require adding an additional clock. That's a bad thing and here's why; for example say the L1 is accessed in 2 clocks and has a 75% hit rate. Doubling it's size may raise the hit rate to over 80% but it will require 3 clocks instead of 2 for all accesses. Have you gained anything? No you've made all accesses 50% longer for just a small increase in hit rate. So L1 may be small but it's very fast and the size is optimized for overall performance. The 90nm process may allow for a larger L1 with no access penalty, we'll just have to wait and see.

EP