Quote:
Originally posted by Lasereth
To further explain, there is an aspect of processors called "L Cache," which is memory built into the processor. More L cache is always good. There are multiple levels of L cache with levels 1 and 2 counting the most in gaming.
Athlon XP's have 64kb+64kb L1 cache. Pentium 4's have 12k+8k L1 cache. Athlon XP's have 256kb of L2 cache, and the higher-end Barton-core Athlon XP's have 512kb L2 cache. Pentium 4's have 512kb L2 cache as well.
As you can see, the Athlon XP has more L1 cache and the same amount of L2 cache in most cases.
The Athlon 64 is even more impressive. Starting at the Athlon 64 3200+ and above, the Athlon 64 series has 1 MB of L2 cache. This explains their extreme performance in games despite having a lower clock speed. None of Intel's chips have any more than 512kb L2 cache, and all still have 12kb+8kb L1.
In a nutshell, more cache = good, and Athlon XP's simply have more onboard L cache while comparing the same P4 with CPU speed. That, combined with incredibly intuitive internal design is what makes AMD's CPU's compare and even beat out Intel's.
-Lasereth
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I knnow you said a general explanation and I don't mean to threadjack but...
I was under the impression that too large of a cache will increase miss rates and penalties, and there is a point where the benefit from a larger cache is outweighed by the penalites from increased misses - so by adding more capacity to your cache you will eventually peak out your performance until the complexity of finding stuff in the cache starts sending your perfomance down the tubes.
There's something else that makes AMD's architecture use clock cycles more efficiently, but I'm not sure what that is.
Intel uses simultaneous multithreading, which their marketing dept calls "hyper-threading".
I am no expert on computer architecture by any means and if I am wrong please correct me.