As explained in the article Cutting to the Core, L2 Cache just might be the only difference between processors you’re about to choose, apart from one big difference .. the price. Question is .. does more L2 cache make a performance difference. Answer .. yes. Next question now is, is it worth spending extra money on that extra L2 cache. Now .. that depends. Doubling the L2 Cache from 1 MB to 2 MB would roughly give you a performance boost of about 5-10%. But it also may mean that you’re going to chuck out extra Rs.10,000! Have a look at the graph below
How does this interpret to your usage? Well .. if you’re going to make the processor do a lot of work .. be it through a single application or multitasking a lot of applications at a time, then yes, you would notice the difference .. otherwise, you probably wouldn’t benefit from the extra cache, and then you might as well save some money.
A guy posted this beautiful analogy on a forum
If the clock speed is the engine and the cache is the fuel tank. With a small fuel tank, all the speed in the world won’t help much if you have to keep stopping for fuel every few miles, a large fuel tank means you can floor the pedal and appreciate the speed for quite a while.
For a normal user i think L2 cache is not a big issue, i mean for a user who just want to check emails, music etc. even 2MB is fine But what about vista. Is L2 cache make any impact on vista working?
As Ram is a very important thing in Vista
John Daniel
January 6th, 2009