What do you think would be faster?

[Philippine Mango]

Before I ask the question, how important is Level 2 cache for m0n0wall? Does m0n0wall take advantage of level 2 cache? I was wondering because I have a choice between a Pentium 90 with 512KB level 2 cache and iirc 64k level 1 cache or a Socket 7 board (low end) with out any level 2 cache but has a K6-II 450MHZ processor in there. I could potentially put a 200MHZ pentium inside the P90 machine (purposely put a slower processor in there) but I'm still wondering Pentium 90 or not, is the K6-II system faster? Would it only be faster in this case because acting as a firewall doesn't really require any level 2 cache? Or maybe it's slow because it can easily take advantage of the cache?


???

 

[Philippine Mango]

bump

 

[Gouv]

The K6-II 450 will almost certainly be faster than both of the others. The processor will first check L1 cache for the data. If the data is not in L1 it will look in L2. I don't know about this specific application, but if you are only running one program the required data will probably fit in L1, making cache misses rare.

For reference, check benchmarks of the Celeron 300 (not the Celeron 300a). That processor had no L2 cache but was still faster than a Pentium MMX 233 in some situations.

Also, the K6-II boards typically had a spot for L2 cache on the motherboard. Maybe you could take the chips out of the P-90 board and put them into the K6-II board?

 

[Philippine Mango]

Originally posted by: Gouv
The K6-II 450 will almost certainly be faster than both of the others. The processor will first check L1 cache for the data. If the data is not in L1 it will look in L2. I don't know about this specific application, but if you are only running one program the required data will probably fit in L1, making cache misses rare.

For reference, check benchmarks of the Celeron 300 (not the Celeron 300a). That processor had no L2 cache but was still faster than a Pentium MMX 233 in some situations.

Also, the K6-II boards typically had a spot for L2 cache on the motherboard. Maybe you could take the chips out of the P-90 board and put them into the K6-II board?

Thing is though, the board is a value OEM board from IBM and I overclocked the FSB and ran a 6X multiplier in order to achieve the higher clock speeds, really meant for a 233mhz processor and less. The board clearly has the outline for surface mounted cache but there is no cache there, only way to get cache on the board is to solder it on. No cache memory slot so can't upgrade it in a conventional way.

Too bad, another gripe about the system is that the boot times are slowed by 1 minute due to the onboard IDE controller. I've noticed that when HDD bootup is disabled (set for A:\) it boots immediately opposed to staying at the bios summary page for about a minute or two.