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Dual Caches for Dual-core Chips

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the doubling-your-pleasure dept.

DominoTree writes "The dual-core chips that AMD and Intel plan to bring to market next year won't be sharing their memories. A version of Opteron coming in 2005 and Montecito, a future member of Intel's Itanium family also slated for next year, will both have two processor cores, the actual unit inside a processor that performs the calculations, and each core will have separate caches."

1 of 342 comments (clear)

  1. Single is better! by cowboynealisfat · · Score: 0, Redundant

    In case it's not obvious to those who didn't read the article all the way through, it's a better thing when the memory is shared (single cache) rather than separate (dual cache). But that is harder to design, so for these first-generation dual-core chips from Intel and AMD, they are using separate caches for each core. (IBM's dual core Power4 [ibm.com] processor has a unified cache.) At some point down the road, they will most likely unify them to increase performance.