With the introduction of a new chip, I thought it might be helpful to show off an entire set of Cachemem latency test results. That's how the evil graphs you see below came into existence. I've tried to make them readable by highlighting the L1 data and L2 caches and main memory for you with different colors. The yellow color represents L1 cache. L2 cache is light orange, and main memory is deeper orange. You can see the effects of Barton's larger L2 cache on memory access latencies at the 512K block size.

The Pentium 4, meanwhile, has a very different cache arrangement. The L1 data cache on the P4 is only 8K, so the L2 cache is much more important. Also, you can see that the Pentium 4 generally enjoys slightly lower latencies in accessing main memory, except when the step sizes get larger.

These graphs are no doubt a little overindulgent, but then I like 'em that way. Their point is to show precisely how Barton has changed the performance dynamics, so we can better understand why the rest of the benchmark results turn out like they do. Now, let's get on to more general application benchmarks.