rwessel (robertwessel@yahoo.com) on 10/29/08 wrote:
---------------------------
>David Kanter (dkanter@realworldtech.com) on 10/29/08 wrote:
>---------------------------
>>Ladies and Gentlemen,
>>
>>I am very happy to announce that my brother Aaron and I have written up the first
>>part of a long over-due article that takes a deep dive into the performance of modern CPUs.
>>
>>Two years ago, we started playing with Code Analyst and VTune to gather performance
>>profiling data on common gaming benchmarks. Our goal is to try and dive one level
>>deeper than traditional benchmarking and quantitatively explore why Intel's Core
>>2 is vastly superior to AMD's K8 for the benchmarks we selected.
>>
>>Our articles goes through many of the problems we dealt with (such as flaky tools,
>>inconsistent results, etc.) and presents a substantial amount of data on relatively modern applications.
>>
>>Please take a read and use some of this information to think about how future CPUs,
>>such as Nehalem and Barcelona might perform.
>>
>>http://realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT102808015436
>
>
>In reference to Figure 9 (L1I Cache Misses per Instruction Retired (MPKI)), the following seems backwards:
>
>"Unsurprisingly, AMD’s larger caches carry the day with an advantage of around
>1 MPKI for many of the various benchmarks and configurations. The main exceptions
>here are Far Cry High and Fear Low, which both seem to barely favor Intel."

Mea culpa - I seem to have problems reading my own graphs : )

It's clear from the graphs and data that in fact, Intel's L1I cache tends to outperform AMDs.

David