Bij CPU Review hebben ze een preview in elkaar gezet rondom de nieuwe processor van Via/Cyrix genaamd Joshua. Het is de bedoeling dat VIA hiermee in het low-end segment gaat rouleren. Hieronder vast een klein gedeelte uit het artikel:
The large 64k L1 cache, with the addition of the 256k of full-speed L2 cache will be able to feed the core at a higher rate than any previously released Cyrix processor.I was assured by the Cyrix representative that the floating point unit is also much improved.
The "mutually exclusive" description of the L2 cache implies that it will be possible to configure the processor to treat the L2 cache as a slightly slower extension of the 64k L1 cache; resulting in overall higher performance as the core would effectively see a 320k "L1.5" cache.
For integer/business use I would expect that Joshua's performance would be somewhere between a Celeron and a Coppermine at the same frequency; certainly more than enough performance for the value / integrated market.
I am very much looking forward to testing Joshua; it will be interesting to see how well my predictions of its performance will match reality.
