l2 cache important

[faith4]

is L2 Cache for a cpu very important ?
is there big performance between L2 cache cpu's with 1mb and 2 mb ?
cuz all amd x2 64 athlon's have 1mb cache and intel core 2 duo's got 2 mb

 

[TRDCorolla1]

The level 2 cache is normally much bigger than level 1 cache. The purpose of the L2 cache is to constantly read in slightly larger quantities of data from RAM, so that these are available to the L1 cache. They are slower than L1 cache, but still much faster than regular RAM. It helps in data prefetch to make operations faster. Bigger, the better.

 

[faith4]

so the L2 cache is not that a big difference in performance right ? since is only reading from the data of ram.

 

[prosser13]

Not really.

You'll see a big jump if you go from say, 256kb to 2MB, but if you're going from say 512k to 1MB you won't really see any increase.

After around 1MB, you don't really see much of an increase at most times, simply because the PC doesn't need to put in that much data.

 

[faith4]

oh ic. 1mb is good enough,
thanks dude

 

[PerfectSK]

Might want to read this, if you want to find out more about l2 cache.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L2_cache