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, if present, represents L3 cache. Of course, caches sometimes overlap, so the colors are just an interesting visual guide.

Although it can't quite match the latencies of AMD's 2.4GHz Athlon 64 chips, the 3500+ isn't far behind. Note the 3400+'s lower latencies at the 1024KB block size when compared with the 3500+, that's the 3400+'s larger L2 in action.