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View Full Version : TiBOOK: L3 or L2????




sphereboy
May 15, 2002, 12:52 PM
I was on the apple web page again staring at the TiBook waiting for mine to arrive while I noticed something strange:

It says in the specs when you click on BUY:

800MHz PowerPC G4
1MB L3 & 256K L2 cache

Why does it say 1MB L3 "AND" 256K L2 cache?

Why are there two cache thingies??



cb911
May 15, 2002, 04:20 PM
well one is 1MB and the other is 512k. if there are 2 caches it will be alot better.

sphereboy
May 15, 2002, 05:40 PM
:confused:

cb911
May 15, 2002, 06:16 PM
sorry, i don't really know what the caches are for. of the limited amount of info i know about caches, here is what i can tell you: i think that the caches store data that is coming from the processer to RAM and/or visa versa. i'm not really sure about any of this but i think that when one cache is full the data goes to the next cache.
i'm not sure about this either, but i think that the caches are refreshed at every clock cycle. hope this helped.

here's a good site to have a look at if you're wondering about hardware and how a computer works in general: Ars Technica (http://www.arstechnica.com)
sorry i didn't have time to check if they had anythng on caches, but you should find something interesting there.:)

King Cobra
May 15, 2002, 06:25 PM
Yuck...I would not want to explore a web page with a title: "A PC Enthusiast's Resource".

As for previous discussion of the L# cache (and maybe the L2):

http://www.macrumors.com/forums/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=4626

That should work fine.
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Any time is a great time for iPod.

King Cobra
May 15, 2002, 06:28 PM
To correct myself, I meant L3 cache. That dang shift key...

You know, this reminds me of an article for why PCs runs slowly. If I am not mistaken, I think that because PCs have such a small L1 cache (maybe only 8k) small chunks of data can be carried about the computer. I do not have that source on me at the moment. I know that it is a very long web page.
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Any time is a great time for iPod.

sphereboy
May 15, 2002, 06:57 PM
ok thanks. I didn't know the tibook would have both L2 and L3..