Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!husc6!bu-cs!mirror!prism!rob
From: rob@prism.TMC.COM
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: 64K vs 256K cache on 25Mh 386
Message-ID: <206900134@prism>
Date: 19 Oct 89 13:54:00 GMT
References: <4743@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>
Lines: 15
Nf-ID: #R:sdcc6.ucsd.edu:-474300:prism:206900134:000:739
Nf-From: prism.TMC.COM!rob    Oct 19 09:54:00 1989


    I'd doubt that going from a 64K to a 256K cache would be worth it
in your case. Increasing cache size beyond a certain point is a classic
diminishing-returns practice, at least on single tasking systems like
DOS (which I'm assuming is what you use).

   The cache increase would probably gain you about 5% on CPU bound
tasks. If the work you're doing is floating-point intensive, the
increase might be a bit less, since such problems tend to be bound
more by compute time than memory access time (which is what a cache
improves). 

   Finally, since you say you work with fairly small amounts of data,
it's very possible that the 64K cache is entirely adequate, so that 
expanding it would offer only a negligible performance increase.