Building a new system....

[Frank J. Carmickle]

Sorry guys.  I have been in Sanfran for the last week.  I had a fun time
out there.

Ok the biggest differences in the athlon the duron and the thunderbird are
the amount and speed of the cache.  The thunderbird has 256k of level two
cache at full speed.  This is a major advantage.  I am not sure about the
duron exactly.  I believe that it just has a smaller l1 and l2 caches.
The clasic athlons had 512kb of l2 cache that ran at different speeds
depending on which processor you had.  The fastest I think they run at is
400mhz.  If you had an 800mhz processor it wouldn't be to bad.  Once you
get up to faster then that you take a big performance hit because it takes
so long for the l2 to move to l1.  Plus the pipe line can only be 64 bit.
In the case of the thunderbird they are not user a wider bus then 64 on
chip for some reason.  That however is projected to be a 256 bit bus some
time soon.

I hope this helped anybody.  If you have any more questions I may be able
to help you out so don't hesitate to ask.  

Frank


On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Buddy Brannan wrote:

> Nah, send your comments to the list....I'm sure I'm not the only guy who's
> interested in what the difference is between Athlon, Duron, and Thunderbird
> (besides Terry, that is)...
> Buddy Brannan, KB5ELV
> Voice mail: 877-791-5298
> Email: davros at ycardz.com
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>