Putting a 1.48GHz Tualatin CPU in an Xbox

An anonymous reader writes "A stock Microsoft Xbox has a 733 MHz Intel CPU with 128KB L2 cache. On Valentine's Day, Friendtech will launch the DreamX-1480, a modified Xbox with a 1.48 GHz Tualatin-core CPU with 256KB L2 cache, promising better framerates and more stable network gaming. FiringSquad has the review."

Comments

Re:so whats the deal.

[hawkstone]

Here are correct links:

FriendTech
The FriendTech DreamX XBox project

Re:so

[philthedrill]

You won't see 1 MB L1 caches, at least not in the forseeable future. The reason there is a memory hierarchy is to reduce access time due to address decoding and (especially) wire delays while keeping costs low since cache is expensive in terms of transistors... 1 MB is simply too large for the L1 to have a reasonable access time. L1 is performance critical, so a large L1 could hurt performance more than it helps, regardless of the hit rate. Plus, if you plan on implementing multiple processors (Xbox Next?), it may be a good idea to have inclusion (where data in L1 is guaranteed to also reside in L2) to shield the L1 from remote probe requests. This in turn means that your L2 should be much larger than your L1 (or else your L2 really doesn't serve much of a purpose).