Volgens geruchten bij JC en c't zal de Spitfire (low-end 'Celeron' versie van de Athlon) met 64Kb low-latency L2 cache uitgevoerd worden:
I had heard this in the form of an anonymous tip a week or so ago, but didn't move on it. You could probably assume that this one will be true, based on that and the fact that we're getting a sort of confirmation from c't: They suggest that the low end version of the Athlon, Spitfire, will be packaged with a quaint 64KB L2 cache on the processor die. Interesting strategy ... it appears that there really will be a performance difference between AMD's low and high end parts.It's going to be interesting to see how this stacks up. If I understand Johan's explanation of "exclusive cache" well enough, this means we're going to have a K7 with 192KB of low latency cache (Spitfire) against a P6 with 128KB of low, but slightly higher than the Spitfire's, latency cache (Celeron, or "Coppermine-128"). I'd imagine that this processor will perform somewhere between the Celeron and the Coppermine in performance, which is probably good but slightly annoying in that I was hoping for an ubercheap ultrapowerful option, and it looks like the Spitfire won't be zoomy enough for me, I'll have to save up extra for something with a little more oomph.
[break] Voor de volledigheid de info uit dat artikel van c't: [/break] Wie bereits gemeldet plant AMD im ersten Quartal nächsten Jahres eine 800-MHz-Version des Athlon auf den Markt zu bringen. Die Hürde von 1 GHz will man im 2. Quartal 2000 überspringen. Bis dahin dürften auch die ersten Muster des Thunderbird auftauchen. Hierbei handelt es sich um eine Athlon-CPU, die wie Intels Coppermine über einen integrierten Full-Speed-L2-Cache von 256 KByte verfügt. Als "Spitfire" mit nur 64 KByte L2-Cache soll der Athlon dann auch den Consumer-Markt erobern. Für Server hat AMD den "Mustang" vorgesehen, der mit bis zu 2 MByte integriertem Full-Speed-L2-Cache aufwarten soll.
