Quote Originally Posted by saaya View Post
lots of cache... sigh... doesnt sound very promising...
whenever somebody put lots of cache on a chip in the past it was done to boost performance when tweaking the core wasnt possible or too much of a hassle...
this is THE new architecture and it comes with lots of cache instead of using as much die space for logic as possible... idk, to me this sounds like bad news...
then again, this is a server part anyways and not aimed at desktops, so i guess there lots of cores with lots of cache is good news and fp perf and ipc doesnt matter than much... i guess itll do well for servers... doesnt sound like itll do well in the desktop area at all though :/
not true, some of the most powerful CPUs in the world have tons of cache (some IBM machines have crazy specs, but ofc, they are not x86 cpus), much more than 16 MB so that they can load huge chunks of data straight into the cpu. It's good to have lots of cache, if you can put it to good use.

I was actually thinking, cache need will increase in the future, because as the cpu gets faster, more data is being processed so big amounts of cache will be required.

16 MB of cache for 8 cores doesn't sound bad, I7s and Phenoms have 8-9 MB of total cache for 4 cores or 6, 16 MB for 8 looks just like a normal evolution to me.

it's 1MB of L2 for each core, 2MB per module and an extra of 8MB L3 shared among 8 cores, 1MB per core, which doesn't seem that much. I7 quads have 6 MB L3 for 4 cores, 1.5 MB per core, higher ratio than what bulldozer will have.