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intel pentium 4 & dual core & level 1 cache

sonoma1993

Diamond Member
Isnt intel level 1 cache around 32 or 64k? Why hasnt intel ever increase their lvl 1 cache to 128k like the amd has done to the athlon 64? im assuming if intel did goto a 128k+ lvl 1 cache it would help improve it performace.
 
The P4 Prescott has a 16KB L1 Data Cache, and a 12,000-entry Trace Cache.
The reason the P4 has such a small D-Cache is to allow it to hit high clock speeds without having to drag along a large cache, which falls inline with the P4's low IPC, high clock speed philosophy.
 
if intel ever did increase the 16kb data cache to ever 64k, im assuming it would help improve it performance by like 10% maybe? im all for intel and amd to increase performance out of there product for the competition
 
I doubt the P4 would benefit much from a larger L1. Intel had to relax the access latency of the D-Cache when they doubled its size, presumably to prevent it from hindering its clock speed potential.
A smaller, faster L1 that can be updated very quickly seems to suit the P4 better than a larger, slower one. This is probably one of the reasons Prescott has a slightly lower IPC average than Northwood; its D-Cache was doubled in size, but its latency was increased four-fold.
 
Well, its probably more of a design constraint and the pressure to release a CPU with reasonable die size than anything. Original Willamette was supposed to have half the size L2 cache, but 1MB L3 cache on a slot like Pentium II's did, plus full performance FPU, but they scaled it down.
 
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