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Date:      Sat, 12 Apr 1997 14:10:10 +0930 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        spaz@u.washington.edu (John Utz)
Cc:        michaelh@cet.co.jp, avalon@coombs.anu.edu.au, terry@lambert.org, hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: 430TX ?
Message-ID:  <199704120440.OAA29855@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.95.970411094154.31682B-100000@becker2.u.washington.edu> from John Utz at "Apr 11, 97 09:46:26 am"

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John Utz stands accused of saying:
> > 
> > While we're talking about Intel, they claim that they're focusing more on
> > memory bandwidth these days and the Pentium II has some kind of dual bus
> > architecture that makes a significant performance difference.
> 
> 	my instructor claims they separated the cache into instruction
> cache and data-cache.....a previously 'discredited' architecture known to
> the ancients as 'harvard architecture ( howard aiken )' as opposed to the
> traditional 'von neumann' or 'princeton' architecture.... is cache space
> relatively cheap these days?

Split I&D cache is nothing 'discredited' (cf. Sparc, Mips, Motorola),
and full-Havard CPUs have been around all along too (all of the m68k
family, for example).

Cache space has nothing to do with it; the basic idea is that code and
data are not normally tightly mixed (instruction operands count as
'code') and thus having seperate caches for them can be a Good Thing.

It Intel are hailing this as some sort of 'breakthrough', then that's
just one more reason to laugh loudly at them.

>  John Utz	spaz@u.washington.edu

-- 
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