Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Ixse]

Wbmw, Might be wrong but I remember that Intel has 8 way associative L2 as of Pentium III until now. 8 way is only one step from the 16 way associative L2 that AMD implemented as of K7 and maintained till now. Another difference is that AMDs L1 and L2 are exclusive, while Intel's L1 and L2 are not. Intel's L2 is way more dense but has a bit higher latency. AMD uses more computing units than Intel in their cpus (9 issue) up till now too.

There's so many different factors that it's hard to determine why 16 way for AMD is the optimum, while 8 way for Intel is apparently their optimum. I remember that at the time K7 with L2 first became common I read some very detailed tests that showed that 16 way associativity was a good thing for K7.

FWIW, Regards,

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