franki> My Experiance with Laptops is that they are always slower then
franki> comparable desktops, generally the hard disks are slower, the
franki> ram runs slower, ...
Cache memory takes up a lot of space on the CPU die and consumes a lot of
power. When you compare cache sizes between "comparable" laptop and
non-laptop systems (comparable == same model and same clock speed), you will
generally see significantly smaller caches on the laptops and
correspondingly lower performance on real tasks. Smaller caches mean
smaller dies, which means lower power consumption. Modern CPUs are heavily
pipelined and generally run at much higher clock rates than main memory.
Along with all the other stuff that affects pipeline performance, to keep
the pipes moving you have to have the data you want in the cache. Even on a
system that is not paging, you will see substantial performance degradation
if it's not getting almost all its data from cache.
--
Skip Montanaro ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
(847)971-7098
