Quote Originally Posted by gosh View Post
The cache on intel gets trashed before the cache on phenom, L3 on i7 is 16-way set-associative and on Phenom it is 48-way set-associative.
I think that Bulldozer will have strong prefetchers that works on the L2 cache. The size indicates that they are using that trick to gain speed. Same trick that Intel have worked hard on and as I think, many applications is optimized for.
I think the shared L2 per core pair with a size of 2MB is going to be a big deal for many desktop apps.Redpriest over at SA forums once said that AMD suffered a lot because many apps were optimized for just that cache size as a sweet spot (on intel HW since past Core2 they had very fast and large shared L2 cache). AMD finally tackled this issue with fairly large and fast L2. Compared to Thuban,in single or poorly threaded desktop workloads there is now 4x more L2 cache running at full clock with 2x greater load/store BW than Thuban core. Further,the L3 is now 33% larger and partitioned with 2.4Ghz+ frequency(20+ percent improvement Vs Thuban).
Just looking at cache subsystem BD is on whole other level than Thuban.