Quote Originally Posted by JVguest View Post
It's the cache. With only 4x512 meg of L2 cache that actually is fast (the L3 is slow) barc could never match c2q/york. If it had 8 meg L2, I think barc would be 10% faster clock for clock than conroe, and just slightly better than penryn (excepting special cases where the divide latency and shifter really helps penryn). Increasing the L3 won't help much. Since the roadmap doesn't call for increased L2 cache size and we know Barc won't clock well for 2008, AMD will remain well behind Intel performance for all of 2008 (at least) and with Nehalem coming out, all of 2009. The gap isn't large though, and AMD will be fine selling a little cheaper than Intel. Too bad the spent a lot of money going native QC.
No, cache dont benefit K8 or K10 arch much. Also the main reason for Core 2 to have so much cache is to counter the much lower memory bandwidth and hide the latency.

Again, check K8 512Kb vs 1024kb. And use 90nms for both to compare with.