Celeron/PII and more than 512 ram?

[ViralCryption]

I was going to trade a friend of mine an extra stick of pc133, but his roomate butted in and told him not to because Celeron/PII can't cache more than 512 MB. Is this true? Sounded fishy to me, so I told him he was full of **it. I could be wrong, but he is full of **it anyways. <g>

 

[OceanFariy]

I'm not sure, but he sounds full of it. bump.

 

[Rand]

Well he is partially correct, but not entirely. The Intel Celeron processor has a cacheable memory range of 4GB, this is true for all Celeron's.
The Intel Pentium 2 has a cacheable memory range of 512MB in stepping C0, C1, and dA0, all later steppings of the Pentium 2 processor have a cacheable range of 4GB. The vast majority of Pentium 2 processors are of stepping dA1 or later and hence have a cacheable memory range of 4GB, in addition all Pentium 2 processors at 350MHz and faster are of stepping dA1 or later, and as stated previously have a maximum cacheable memory range of 4GB.

This does not mean you cannot necessarily use more memory then that, merely that is the maximum amount of physical memory that is cacheable. Any physical memory acessed beyond that range will take a fairly substantial performance hit. As Windows 9X accesses more from the top down most data stored in the RAM would initially be kept in the uncached portion of the RAM.

 

[AndyHui]

Actually, the original Celeron 266 and Celeron 300 (not 300A) had no cacheable area, since it had no L2 cache.

All Klamath Pentium II processors can only cache 512MB; the majority of Deschutes processors (with the exception of the very earliest Pentium II 333MHz processors) can cache up to 4GB.

Note that the 440LX and 440EX chipsets can only handle 512MB of SDRAM.