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Old 11-06-2000, 11:54 AM   #16
kraken
Philosophical Computing Nutcase
 
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Australia
Posts: 870
Figure it this way. The CPUs are not the thing but the cache is. Full speed cache has many more transistors than the CPU. Pure silicon is an expensive beast and the use of it must be justified. To merely say that L2 cache is turned off is a production overhead that can be determined in dollars and cents. Pure marketing forces cannot justify the turning off of cache. Who in marketing would not jump at the chance to say we got more memory. The addition of level2 cache to a processor is a big dollar excercise. If someone changes a few capacitors and resistors around and says that they have got XXX cache does not mean it is actually so. If x=2 and Y=1 then cache =256 hell that could be just false reporting. The only way to tell if the scenario is correct is to physically take the processor apart and look at it through a microscope. **** Ive got a 6x86 cyrix that is reported as a 486. To correctly ID the processor through windows requires an update. (which hasn't worked and this is an old processor.) My crack about the duron was just that. The Celerons have long been separate from the pentiums. It will just be a matter of time before the pentiums displace the celerons. They are, by the way, virtually identical with the exception of SSE and cache(bus speeds also noted). It may well be that intel are taking a hit with the celerons and are putting pentiums in their place, but I couldn't see them doing so without advertising the increased cache size.

If you can get 100 processors per wafer then that is better than 50.
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