CPU PowerPC G4 question for MorphOS team
  • Order of the Butterfly
    Order of the Butterfly
    Divinity
    Posts: 498 from 2009/9/8
    Hi MorphOS team,

    I have a question about CPU PowerPC "G4" and your OS MorphOS 2.x.

    I'd like to know how much is important the L3 cache 2Mb and L2 256Kb in CPU PowerPC G4 7455 and 7450 VS many CPU PowerPC G4 with L3 cache 0Kb and L2 512Kb in your OS MorphOS 2.x.

    thanks
    regards
  • »06.01.10 - 23:03
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  • Order of the Butterfly
    Order of the Butterfly
    Chain-Q
    Posts: 347 from 2003/10/12
    From: 1 AU, EU, DE/HU
    @Divinity:

    I think PowerPC architecture in general is not that sensitive to the amount of L2/L3 cache. There is hardware (the Efika in particular) which is happily running without any L2/L3 cache at all, and still runs MorphOS quite nicely.

    However, the G4 is a bit special, as its Altivec unit can be quite data-hungry, and you cannot really feed it via the slowish memory interface. So the more cache, still the better. However i'd get the one which is cheaper. With 512K L2, you're quite OK already, especially since the L2 cache is faster. Only benchmarks could tell the real difference, but i doubt there's a really noticeable difference in everyday use (when running at the same clock speed).

    However, i have little experience with machines with L3 cache.
    [.PegasosII/G4.:.Efika.:.Amiga2000/060.]
    [.Free Pascal Compiler MorphOS Port.]
    [.Hosting AmigaSpirit.hu.]
  • »07.01.10 - 08:12
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  • Order of the Butterfly
    Order of the Butterfly
    Divinity
    Posts: 498 from 2009/9/8
    Hi,
    thanks, well this at the moment: I have two Pegasos2 G4@1000, also three PowerMac G4 and also Mac Mini G4@1500 ... etc... some with MOS, other with OSX...other Linux Debian ppc...
    I'm very interested, in particular from MorphOS team, to know the support of L3 cache 2Mb in MorphOS 2.x
    I hope someone of MorphOS team can answare to this particular question.
    Thanks for the support
    regards
  • »07.01.10 - 21:07
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