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It vanished off into the world of hopes and dreams, my friend. But with all the other advancements, I doubt it will make a huge impact on the performance of these new machines. They look like solid upgrades to me in every way. I'd much rather have the larger L2 cache running at a much higher speed than the slower L3 cache, anyway.
 
Apple found that increasing the L2 cache really helped performance, more so than any L3 cache would have. and without L3 cache, they save money as well, and thay gets passed on to us!! good eh!! 😀
 
I don't hear everyone bitching about the G5 not having L3, either. Granted, they are fast as hell so that makes up for anything, but still, it's not like L3 is the magic "speed drug".
 
L3 cache helped when the G4 was limited to 256K. With 512K of L2 cache, most applications won't notice the missing L3 cache.

In fact some applications will be faster with the bigger L2 cache, however, it's tough to compare when you don't have two CPUs that are the same except for L2 cche size. (Same bus speed, same processor speed)
 
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