27 Dec
1998
27 Dec
'98
1:14 p.m.
<Yeah... I figured that you had to have a pretty advanced design (with an
<accompaning fab, although I don't really know about this stuff, it seemed
<like 1 micron was the magic number for on chip caches). I've always liked
<large caches on everything: 512K on a hard drive, a meg on a motherboard,
The key was getting a fab process that could support the extra logic and
the added gates to form the cache memory and cache control. Also caching
requires a lot more smarts that are added to the basic cpu. It represents
a great increase in complexity, total number of logic on die and potentially
power consumption. Those are all parameters to be balanced.
Allison