Question about Athlon xp 3200

[biofear]

I just bought a 3200 and the company I bought it from called me up to see if I wanted to upgrade from a 512 k cache to a 640k cache. My question is what kind of performance increase does the 640 cache do vs. the 512k cache?

 

[nycxandy]

Err... all Athlon XP's have 512KB of L2 Cache.

 

[biofear]

sorry L1 128k, L2 512k

http://www.costcentral.com/prod/AMD/AXDA3200BOX/850867/79/27

 

[Sunner]

They're probably referring to L1+L2 cache, which makes it 640 alltogether(128KB L1 + 512KB L2).
All Athlons and Durons have 128 KB L1 however, with the AthlonXP's you either get 512 KB L2(Barton core) or 256(TBred core).

So, they've probably just misunderstood the models and think the "512 KB" one and the "640 KB" one are different cores, while in reality, they're the same, only in one case they've calculated the cache as L1+L2 and in the other they've just included the L2(which IMO makes sense since all Athlons come with 128 KB L1, so that's kinda implied when you but an Athlon.