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In the Forums... |
Posted: October 31st, 2004
As previously declared the latest Extreme Edition 3.46GHz continues to distance itself from the standard Pentium 4 series through its large 2MB L3 cache. Now that it has also has been awarded the added benefit of the faster 1066MHz FSB its reign extends further but from a pure apples to apples comparison point of view its the cache that tells it apart. In its present form the Extreme Edition tallies 2.5MB of onboard cache (L1 + L2 + L3) which if compared to the Prescott Pentium 4 is more than 2x its size (2568KB Vs 1040KB), and a massive almost 5x the size of a Northwood based Pentium 4 (2568KB Vs 520KB). Evaluated against the likes of AMD's Athlon 64 FX-5x (Clawhammer) series its still about twice larger (2568KB Vs 1280KB) while against Athlon64 (Newcastle, Winchester) over 3x (2568KB Vs 768KB). All this cache is what Intel pins their hopes on when especially underlining the "Extreme" keyword, but whether this it’s enough to permit the Extreme Edition to pull ahead from its domestic peers and competition is at significantly the mercy of software. Intel would dance the night away if software was all written to absorb the merits of large caches but unfortunately for them at best its style can be referenced as "varied". While it is true that a large cache holds the prospective to increasing performance the influence it carries can span anything from nil to considerable improvements over that of a standard smaller cache.
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