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Subject: Re: Pentium 3 vs. Pentium with Xeon

Author: Andrew Slough

Date: 11:41:22 08/05/99

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On August 05, 1999 at 10:29:47, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On August 05, 1999 at 08:50:13, Randy Schmidt wrote:
>
>>I am curious if there are opinions on whether a program would
>>benefit by using the Xeon processor and under what circumstances.
>
>The xeon is somewhat faster.  A PIII runs the L2 cache at core cpu speed/2,
>while the xeon runs the L2 cache at core cpu speed.  IE the L2 cache is 2x
>faster on the xeon.  That is the only difference, but it is definitely a
>measurable difference...

The L2 cache on the Xeon does run at 2x the clock of a PIII, but it is not quite
accurate to say the L2 cache is 2x faster on the Xeon. On the Xeon L2 cache
accesses are 14-1-1-1 (ie 14 processor clocks for the first word read and one
cycle for each consecutive read) on a PIII, cache accesses are 18-2-2-2. That
means a PII has at worst a 50% slower L2 cache (for the case where the word
being read is at the end of the cache line) and at best 28% slower.

The celeron has a faster but smaller L2 cache (than Xeon) and runs at 8-1-1-1.

Andy



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