Memory performance (continued)
Not only are our 3D graphs indulgent, but they're useful, too. I've arranged them manually in a very rough order from worst to best, for what it's worth. I've also colored the data series according to how they correspond to different parts of the memory subsystem. Yellow is L1 cache, light orange is L2 cache, and orange is main memory. The red series on the Extreme Edition graph represents L3 cache. Of course, caches sometimes overlap, so the colors are just an interesting visual guide.
If you look closely, you can see how at the teeny block sizes, the Prescott (Pentium 4 "E") has higher access latencies to its L1 cache than Northwood. Prescott makes up for it a little with its larger L2 cache, as demonstrated at the 1024K block size.
Not only are our 3D graphs indulgent, but they're useful, too. I've arranged them manually in a very rough order from worst to best, for what it's worth. I've also colored the data series according to how they correspond to different parts of the memory subsystem. Yellow is L1 cache, light orange is L2 cache, and orange is main memory. The red series on the Extreme Edition graph represents L3 cache. Of course, caches sometimes overlap, so the colors are just an interesting visual guide.
Compared to any of the Pentiums, the Athlon 64's memory access latencies are extremely low thanks to the A64's built-in memory controller.
