(not to Browntone...just happens to be placed after his post)

Shintai, L3 is just the third level of cache. Says nothing about its performance...

What's stopping it from being nearly identically performing and configured as Core 2's L2 is right now? Maybe Intel wanted another level between Core 2's L1 and L2. Can't call it L1.5...so you bump L2 to L3 and put your new small cache in as L2.