Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz: Does the prophecy hold true?

Cachemem – Cache Bandwidth Comparison

Although the Pentium 4’s L1 cache is of a much lower latency than the Athlon’s, AMD has definitely got a 64KB part of their die that can be marked advantage-AMD.  As you can see, the Pentium 4 at 1.7GHz and the Athlon at 1.33GHz offer similar bandwidth figures in reads from the L1 cache.  However writing to the L1 cache is much in favor of the Athlon offering almost twice as much bandwidth than the Pentium 4 can offer. 

We have been complaining about the Athlon’s 64-bit path to its L2 cache ever since the Thunderbird core was introduced, and here is why.  In bandwidth intensive applications, the Pentium 4 has a huge advantage in L2 cache bandwidth of 68% in reads and over 40% in writes.  Luckily for AMD, its lower latency memory bus is able hide this since most of today’s applications are in fact more latency dependent than they are memory bandwidth dependent (to a certain extent, using PC66 SDRAM is going to obviously cause a bottleneck).