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New Technology - CPU Speeds are Numbers from the past
William Thompson • June 26, 2019
Does anyone know what it means when a processor (or "CPU") has a very high L3 cache?
Does anyone know what it means when a processor (or "CPU") has a very high L3 cache?
Let's go back 10 years to Windows XP. Ahhhhhh, what a wonderful delight! It was a great OS that was super-easy to use. It was one of the greatest versions of Windows ever made. Microsoft even went against the grain and provided continued support for XP after the launch of Windows 8 since that OS was such a huge disappointment.
What made XP so great? It was a fluid running system that had failsafe mechanisms built all over the place. At the time, memory (or "RAM") was extremely expensive. Since most systems in businesses and probably over 90% of every house in America had inadequate memory installed, Microsoft had to come up with a solution. Also, conventional hard drives were having a very hard time keeping up with the speeds that computers had achieved by that time.
So, in essence, computers had become so fast that hard disks simply couldn’t read or write quickly enough to be optimal. What did Microsoft have in mind to help mitigate this speed gap? They created what became known as the "swap file". The swap file is a dedicated portion of your hard drive that temporarily holds objects which typically would have been stored in memory. This helped systems to cope with low-memory conditions but caused a huge issue when trying to run a bunch of different programs at the same time. Another major issue with this innovation was increased wear on the hard drive, decreasing its lifespan by almost half. Yes, the swap file was great for a little while, but all good things must come to an end.
So how does all of this relate to the L3 cache? Eventually, manufacturers started developing the next generation of CPUs and Motherboards, and they needed a solution that would have all the system-speeding effects of the swap file without the wear and tear on the hard disk.
Most PC components, including the CPU, RAM, and drives, are all connected to the motherboard, which is basically the backbone of the entire computer. The cache is built into the CPU, and for this new generation of computers, the L3 cache was implemented to replace swap files. This, in my opinion, was the development which truly led to the speed and performance we experience in computers these days.
One great example involves one of my customers, a man who was rendering videos for a production group that had a show on a satellite subscriber network. This customer swore by his MAC (please don’t blame him). Macs are super-fast right out the box, and I haven’t had to really upgrade one yet aside from typical maintenance tasks such as changing out a few (hundred) HDDs. The L3 cache that Intel provided Apple was in the 3 Megabyte range at the time, though it could not be upgraded. Once all of the video editing for the show had been completed, they then had to export the video in a predetermined format. This process usually took about 4 hours, provided the Mac didn’t crash. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a rendering that took almost 12 hours. I got a call from the customer asking for some serious help.
“I need a Mac that can do this a lot faster,” the customer said. “We are ready to do whatever it takes. Apple quoted over nine thousand dollars to build the powerhouse of all rendering.”
I was already familiar with some Intel-based motherboards that could pull off the task, so I did a little research and found a few supported boards and CPUs. The build was extremely fun and went off without a hitch.
The new CPU had built in 15MB L3 Cache.
So, I delivered and setup this monster of a computer. The cost was merely a third of what Apple had quoted with exact matching specs, and we were ready to see what this baby could do. Seconds after the render started, the customer had already begun to show his excitement!
The entire rendering took 4 minutes.
Now that you can see the difference in 3MB L3 cache as opposed to 15MB L3 cache, try to imagine the benefits of 32MB cache!
The only Intel chips that get even close to this start at $3,000.00 (used) and the only chips you can purchase new are right under $6,000.00.
Now that we have 3D gaming and widespread commercial 3D rendering, and with many construction and production firms relying on 3D technology every day, we can expect to see ridiculous enhances in CPU performance, relegating battery life to afterthought.
I cannot wait to see what manufacturers produce this year, considering that the newest generation of CPUs were just released and there are already talks about the next generation of silicon. Come, let us all take that leap together! -William Thompson
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