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An 8GHz Pentium Processor

January 22, 2007 11:25 pm

A fellow member of the Oaktable Network sent out an interesting URL. So how badly do you think a Pentium 4 overclocked to 8GHz would stall on memory loads?   Can you say, “CPI?”

Posted by kevinclosson

Categories: Overclocked Pentium

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2 Responses to “An 8GHz Pentium Processor”

  1. quick request for a blog entry:

    I know you address it somewhat in the book, but here goes anyway:

    in a NUMA multi-quad, don’t you inherently get a high CPI whenever there is a mem sync clash across quads? How does that impact on things like latches, for example? I never understood properly that section of the book and since you might know a thing or two about the subject I thought I’d ask? 😉

    By Noons on January 22, 2007 at 11:52 pm

  2. Hi Noons,

    Yes, I’ll need to discuss coherency misses. It all depends on how latches are implemented. In short, using a simple test and set sort of spinlock, NUMA suffers with heavily contended latches. In the end, however, it all depends on how “lumpy” the memory is. If a remote memory write is some 100x more costly than a local memory write, then normal spinlock just don’t work–well, they don’t fail but they don’t scale 🙂

    I’ll make sure to cover some of those goodies.

    By kevinclosson on January 23, 2007 at 12:25 am

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