Does the size of the L2 cache on a processor have a large impact upon performance?
Using the limited sampling of benchmarks that have been collected so far, there DOES appear to be a sweet spot in terms of L2 cache size. The L2 cache of the Duron and the Celeron appear to be below this ‘sweet spot’ and the Pentium III, Athlon and Pentium 4 all appear to have a sufficient amount of cache (the size of the L2 cache on these processors varies, but all have an L2 cache size of atleast 256k). The increased frequency of the L2 cache that came with moving the L2 cache onto the processor die (with the P3 and Thunderbird processors for Intel and AMD, respecitively) appears to have improved performance, by a significant but unknown amount. L2 cache size beyond 256k does not appear to impact performance in any significant fashion, if at all. The reason for this is unknown, but since the DF client is “probabilistically sampling conformational space” or doing a “kinetic 3 dimensional walk” or some other such scientific mumbo-jumbo (essentially, it has a pseudo-random progression t
