Apple defends new PowerBooks' lack of L3 cache

[bofus?]

from http://www.thinksecret.com/news/powerbooksl3.html

Apple defends new PowerBooks' lack of L3 cache

By Nick dePlume, Publisher and Editor in Chief

September 23, 2003 - Apple excited customers last week at Apple Expo 
Paris with the introduction of new 12-inch, 15-inch, and 17-inch 
PowerBook G4 models.

Some mobile professionals, however, have pointed out an omission in 
the new portables' tech specs -- L3 cache.

Across the entire product line, the new PowerBooks feature a 512K 
SRAM level 2 cache, but the old 17-inch PowerBook featured a 1MB L3 
cache. Even the aging Titanium PowerBook G4 featured a high-speed L3 
cache, also at 1MB.

Internally, Apple has recognized that the lack of an L3 cache may be 
an issue with some buyers. In fact sheets on the new PowerBooks that 
the company provided to sales reps in the field, the issue was 
raised, but Apple defended the omission, calling L3 cache unnecessary.

"When performing day-to-day tasks, such as reading email, browing the 
Web, and typing Word documents, an L3 cache does not provide 
significantly improved performance over the already fast PowerPC G4," 
the company told sales reps, pointing to the acceleration provided by 
the Velocity Engine."The removal of the 1MB L3 cache may cause 
concern among members of the video editing community because video 
encoding to MPEG-2 made use of our L3 cache. Some members of this 
community have come to look for L3 cache in products that they 
purchase," Apple acknowledged.

"However, the faster processor and doubled L2 cache will compensate 
for the slower L3 cache. This should make the overall experience 
faster."


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