Penryn vs SR Cache

[GeneKam]

well i was reading up and realized that Penryn actually has 3 mb L2 shared while SR has 4 Mb L2 shared, so technically SR has asmse level cash but one more mb of it, and i was just wondering how cache would improve preformance, i mean SR has 1/4 more cache

 

[NJuul]

Read: http://www.macworld.com/article/132330/2008/03/macbookpro_bench.html

 

[crayonshin]

Also check out this review by Anand of Anandtech. I recommend reading the whole thing but you can just skip to page 4 where he addresses your question. In short, don't sweat the loss of the 1MB of cache. Even in the story NJuul links to, you can see that the current base MBP can go toe to toe with the previous high end BTO MBP despite having 1MB less cache and 200MHz lower clock speed.

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3246

 

[n1ght]

Yeah, synthetic benchmarks don't mean everything.

Penryn's 45nm process, SSE4.1 instruction set, reduced power usage, and reduced heat output far outweigh the 1MB of cache.