AMD's Thunderbird Cache

[Guest]

Could sb. please tell me how fast is amd's level 2 cache. Could someone pls. explain it to Intel freax that it is a full speed cache which means if your processor's frequency is 1 Ghz then the cache is working at the same frequency cause it is internal now, and not at half speed which was the case with slotA-s and Slot1-s. Thank you.

 

[Guest]

The original Athlon and the Katmai P3 both used 512k of half-speed Level 2 cache mounted within the processor package but it was separate from the processor die. This became a servere bottleneck to performance so first intel then AMD moved to full speed on die caches. Both the Athlon Thunderbird and the P3 Coppermine incorporated 256k of Level 2 cache on the processor die that ran at the SAME speed as the processor thus improving performance. Additionally, AMD released the Duron which incorporated a smaller amount of cache (64k but again full speed) in order to be able to sell it more cheaply through increased yields.

 

[mpjesse]

Many reviews showed that the L2 cache on the old Athlons (Slot A) didn't even perform at half the speed of the CPU. According to AMD it was "supposed to".

-MP Jesse