On Fri, Aug 06, 1999 at 12:27:25PM +0200, Nils Rennebarth wrote: > On Fri, Aug 06, 1999 at 09:48:05AM +0200, E.L. Meijer Eric" wrote: > > The only difference between a PII and a PIII at the same clock speed > > that I know of are the extra `SSE' instructions that are mainly useful > > for 3D stuff and maybe some other floating point intensive software. > IIRC, the 2nd level cache of the Pentium III is running at the same speed as > the CPU, wheras the 2nd level cache of Pentium II's is running at half the > CPU speed.
Actually, the P3 has the same speed L2 cache as the P2 (that is, half the CPU speed). The Celeron-As and the Xeons are the ones with full-speed L2 cache on them. > This should give a performance difference (though not enough for me, > compared to the price difference) I haven't benchmarked them myselves, but I have heard that the P3 is *slightly* slower at the same clock speed due to some changes made to the core to enable the clock rate to climb later. (i.e. a 450MHz P2 might be slightly quicker than a 450MHz P3, but they can't build a 600MHz P2, but they can build a P3). The above statement doesn't include the benefits you would receieve in a application optimized for and using the new P3 SSE instructions, obviously. Then there's quite a large difference in speed. -- Matthew Gregan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
