Memory performance (continued)
Here's a slightly indulgent look at memory access latencies in more detail. If the following intimidates you, just skip to the next page with the gaming results. Remember, though, to flip back here if the boss is looking over your shoulder.

I've colored the data series below 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.

The access latency graph on the previous page gave us a small slice of the info above, and it was largely representative. Notice how remarkably similar the numbers are for the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition at 3.46GHz and the Pentium M at 2.4GHz. The Pentium M, however, appears to have lower access latencies to its L2 cache, especially at larger block and step sizes.