More on Athlon Overclocking

The Tech Report is running an article concerning Athlon overclocking. With the 1Ghz+ chips coming down the line apparently soon, will things need to change? Or will it be just a documentation change? The other change is the issue of moving to on-die L2 cache - how will that affect things?

Comments

On-Die Cache

[Datafage]

The move to on-die cache is what has me most interested. High-speed cache is what affects gaming most, not the actual size of the cache, and as we all know, gaming is what counts.:) For repetitive tasks, such as searching a database, a larger L2 cache is superior. For non-repetitive tasks, like drawing triangles, the faster cache will win out. Of course, if you can get both, like the Xeon or alleged Athlons with 8 Meg full-speed cache, life is good.

Full-speed cache is the only thing letting aluminummines approach or outperform Athlons, just look at the graphs and you'll see that the P3s get closer and closer as the speed increases, and the Athlon's cache gets slower and slower by comparison. With full-speed cache, AMD will be in a very good position as far as benchmarks go. If you think the Athlon is a good performer now, just wait. :)

Am I the only one thinking we'll be seeing the BiAthlon and TriAthlon just like the P2 and P3 came along?

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