Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Removing L3 frees up transistors to be spent on L1/L2. On a modern processor the vast majority of transistors are spent on caches.

Why this might help, ultimately, because the latency for getting something from L1 or L2 is a lot lower than the latency from L3 or main memory.

That said, this could hurt multithreaded performance. L1/2 are used for 1 core in the system. L3 is shared by all the cores and a package. So if you have a bunch of threads working on the same set of data, having no L3 would mean doing more main memory fetches.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: