Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Very few program's speed are greatly dependent on raw processor speed. Processor speed is one of the great marketing gimmicks of all time. Of course it has *some* effect, but the bottleneck is almost never the CPU, and usually the speed of getting data and/or code out of RAM and onto the CPU and from their into the core for the instructions to be
Sigh. /s/their/there
executed. CPU cache faults are really, really expensive, so the bigger the pipeline into the core, the fewer the cache faults.
And double sigh. Obviously I wasn't paying too much attention to what I was writing. Obviously the number of cache faults is determined by the size of the cache, not the size of the pipeline.
Generally speaking, a processor with a fast core but a small cache will not perform as well as a processor with a slower core but a bigger cache. Within reason -- obviously it depends on the nature of the code being executed, some code doesn't benefit much from a processor cache.
-- Steven _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
