Quad Core Battle, Intel Yorkfield vs AMD Altair

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Wednesday October 4, 2006 @02:36AM from the four-is-way-more-than-three dept.

Joe writes "Yorkfield Extreme Edition based on the 45nm Penry core architecture will meet heads-on with AMD Altair based on the 65nm K8L core in Q3 2007 as reported by VR-Zone. Due to its advanced 45nm process technology, Yorkfield XE is able to pack a total of 12MB L2 cache (2 x 6MB L2) and still achieving a much smaller die size and higher clock speed of 3.43-3.73Ghz. Yorkfield will feature Penryn New Instructions (PNI) or more officially known as SSE4 with 50 more new instructions. Yorkfield XE will pair up nicely with the Bearlake-X chipset supporting DDR3 1333, PCI Express 2.0 and ICH9x coming in the Q3 '07 timeframe as well."

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Re:Isn't that going a bit far? by DrDitto · 2006-10-04 04:00 · Score: 3, Insightful

I mean, frankly... isn't 12MB L2 overkill? We're barely putting today's 2-4MB to good use.

Are you kidding me? With a 4-way superscalar processor running at 3GHz, any cache miss can result in the processor being completely idle for 50-100ns. At an aggressive 50ns memory latency, this is up to 600 wasted opportunities to retire instructions.