From: Foghorn Leghorn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>But I hypothesize that there is one area (besides the processor) in
>which a certain extravagance might be beneficial--the memory system. As
>I understand it, Prime95 uses multi-megabyte arrays of data, and the
>speed of access to them is a major limiting factor in performance. From
>what I've heard, even a Xeon processor with a 2MB cache is not a huge
>help.
>
>And so I have an idea: would it be possible and feasible to build the
>main memory from SRAM? I would expect this to give a bigger improvement
>than most of the processor advances that are on the horizon, including
>the Pentium III, and only 8 or 12 MB per system should be needed. Can
>anyone comment on how much this would help, what it would cost, and
>whether it is possible with existing motherboards?
>
Prime95 currently looks to be using about 5 megs of memory. What I'm
going to try is to get a K7 when it comes out, with the standard 512k of
L2 cache, and the best initial memory speed I can find. When the price
of the K7 with 8 megs of on-chip L2 cache falls to a reasonable price,
I'm going to swap the 512k CPU out and put the 8 meg CPU in. With
8 megs available, the Prime95 program and the most used OS routines
should all fit in the L2 cache. That should give about the fastest
Prime95 speed available in a normal x86 machine.
On your question of using SRAM for all of system RAM, from what little I
know, I'd guess it would draw a lot of power, but it could work. I don't
know
if any of the motherboard chipsets are set up to drive SRAM as main
memory, so that might be a hurdle you'd have to get over.
Paul Missman
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