The merits/weak points of the cache system

Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology

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L1-cache first appeared in Intel's 80486DX chip. Today, bigger and better CPU cache is a natural step in the development of new CPUs. Here we only see the internal caches, i.e. cache integrated to the CPU and working at the full clock speed.

While all AMD Athlon processors currently being manufactured by AMD feature 256K of full-speed, on-die L2 cache memory, previous versions, without on-die L2 cache, may still be commercially available in some computer systems. Ask your computer manufacturer for details and refer to processor benchmarks for information regarding the performance of the previous AMD Athlon processor.

The AMD Athlon processor's high-performance cache architecture includes an integrated dual-ported 128KB split-L1 cache with separate snoop port; an integrated full-speed,16-way set-associative, 256KB L2 cache using a 72-bit (64-bit data + 8-bit ECC) interface; and a multi-level split 512-entry Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB).

The AMD Athlon processor's large integrated full-speed L1 cache is comprised of two separate 64KB, two-way set-associative data and instruction caches which is four times larger than the Pentium III processor's L1 cache (128KB vs. 32KB). By featuring a larger L1 cache, applications running on AMD Athlon processors perform significantly faster since more instruction and data information is local to the processor. The data cache also has eight banks to provide maximum parallelism for running multiple applications. It supports concurrent accesses by two 64-bit loads or stores. The instruction cache contains predecode data to assist multiple, high-performance instruction decoders. Both instruction and data caches are dual-ported and contain dedicated snoop ports to eliminate all system coherency traffic, common in systems with many devices, from interfering with application performance.

The AMD Athlon processor's seventh-generation microarchitecture, including a high-bandwidth system bus and on-die L2 cache* , enables it to attain outstanding levels of performance. Plus, the AMD Athlon processor delivers industry-leading integer, floating point, and 3D multimedia performance for x86 platforms.