Intel Pentium 4 6xx and 3.73EE: Favoring Features Over Performance

jmke · 21st February 2005, 15:28

As we can see, the unfortunate truth for performance on the 600 series is that most consumer data sets can fit into a 1MB cache just fine. The added cache does seem to help with multitasking from our limited investigation of the subject. The more threads that hit memory aggressively, the better chance we have of seeing a benefit from the 2MB cache. This is because less data from each thread will be kicked out of the cache, resulting in fewer pipeline stalls.

Unfortunately, most usage models that are a good fit for the 600 series are server and workstation workloads. Streaming data (using or encoding media), games, and most other consumer applications don't have the lots of big data requirement that can really separate the performance of the 1MB and 2MB parts.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=2353&p=1

21st February 2005, 15:28	#1
jmke Madshrimp Join Date: May 2002 Location: 7090/Belgium Posts: 79,021	Intel Pentium 4 6xx and 3.73EE: Favoring Features Over Performance As we can see, the unfortunate truth for performance on the 600 series is that most consumer data sets can fit into a 1MB cache just fine. The added cache does seem to help with multitasking from our limited investigation of the subject. The more threads that hit memory aggressively, the better chance we have of seeing a benefit from the 2MB cache. This is because less data from each thread will be kicked out of the cache, resulting in fewer pipeline stalls. Unfortunately, most usage models that are a good fit for the 600 series are server and workstation workloads. Streaming data (using or encoding media), games, and most other consumer applications don't have the lots of big data requirement that can really separate the performance of the 1MB and 2MB parts. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=2353&p=1 __________________