thekingofpain
10-18-2000, 12:01 PM
Copied from oc.com:
If you look at the results of Duron 1000 and Athlon 1287 you might notice something very interesting. The benchmark score in the majority of the tests doesn't increase anymore as much as expected. This is particularly obvious in case of Duron at 1 GHz. There's only one explanation for this behavior. A clock multiplier of x9.5 seems to be the sweet spot of Duron and its 64 kB second level cache. Increasing Duron's clock frequency to 10 times the bus clock or more makes the clock difference between bus and processor core too big for Duron's small L2-cache to buffer the supply with code and data from main memory. Basically Duron is simply not getting any faster anymore, because the core is starving for code and data at a core-to-bus-clock ratio of beyond 9.5. The same seems to be valid for Athlon at a multiplier of beyond 12.5, which might be the reason why AMD didn't incorporate any higher multiplier into Athlon's core."
If you look at the results of Duron 1000 and Athlon 1287 you might notice something very interesting. The benchmark score in the majority of the tests doesn't increase anymore as much as expected. This is particularly obvious in case of Duron at 1 GHz. There's only one explanation for this behavior. A clock multiplier of x9.5 seems to be the sweet spot of Duron and its 64 kB second level cache. Increasing Duron's clock frequency to 10 times the bus clock or more makes the clock difference between bus and processor core too big for Duron's small L2-cache to buffer the supply with code and data from main memory. Basically Duron is simply not getting any faster anymore, because the core is starving for code and data at a core-to-bus-clock ratio of beyond 9.5. The same seems to be valid for Athlon at a multiplier of beyond 12.5, which might be the reason why AMD didn't incorporate any higher multiplier into Athlon's core."