The second level of cache has been getting bigger and bigger at a rapid pace for the last few years. Not just in size, but the fact that it wasn’t too long ago when we didn’t have any L2 cache at all, then we had L2 cache residing on the motherboard, till today when we have several megabytes of L2 cache integrated into the processor. Intel has been very good at integrating quite large amounts of L2 cache into its processors and with the coming generation based on 45nm technology, Intel has managed to fit 6MB of L2 cache per silicon. It will also launch a model with as much as 12MB of L2 cache in a single processor, but how much does the L2 cache really affect the overall performance of a processor? This is something we will investigate in today’s article. We compare three different models with 1, 2 and 4 MB of L2 cache to see if and perhaps how much of a difference it really is between them when the L2 cache is the only thing separating them.
”To elaborate further, you can remove all of the cache and make a really cheap processor. It will not only be very cheap, but also extremely slow. But how much does the second level of cache really influence and affect the performance of today’s Core 2 Duo processors? We at NordicHardware have gathered three processors, with 4MB, 2MB and 1MB respectively, to investigate this more thoroughly.”
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