Post your comments on the article entitled: "The Fundamentals Of Cache"

Article: http://www.systemlogic.net/articles/00/10/cache

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during various articles ive read that using too much memory on a mobo actually causes a caching penalty. i dont consider myself dumb but can someone explain to me what a caching penalty in effect is and how can you determine how much memory a mobo can handle without such a penalty?
thanks :P

The reason is that memory needs "tags" to "cache" a region of memory. On the older socket 7 and SS7 motherboards, these tags were either found on the chipset, or the SRAMS themselves.

When on the SRAMS themselves, adding more cache increases the cacheable region of memory. This gives the illusion that adding cache is what makes the cacheable region larger. Sometimes, the chipset has its own, but adding more cache adds to the cacheable region if the SRAMS have cache tags.

If you have a slot 1, A, socket A, or socket 370, don't worry about it

so you mean to tell me that these mobos that support up to 1.x gig of memory can actually utilize all that (not that i can see someone using that much at one time)?
just curious.

would this also cause a system to lockup if there is tomuch mem installed on the board ...
the reason i ask was that i was running 256 on a ss7 board and droped it down to 128 and have had no problems

__________________
~Jon~
if you have to stop and wonder then you have already lost

Nope. If there are not enough cache tags, your overall performance will simply drop. If you actually needed to use all that memory, then it's certainly faster than disk paging, but if you're doing something only within the 128mb, and if you don't have enough cache tags, then it will be slower with 256 than 128.

I believe, however, that most SS7 chipsets have enough cache tags (or, in many cases, they have enough SRAMS, which themselves inclue enough cache tags) to cover 256Mb. I could be wrong, I'm not quite up to par with my knowledge of those chipsets.....

I think that you either have a bad dimm. It has also been shown that some boards display less stability when they have more memory installed - the timings are more crucial, etc.

This is why Abit has put some "buffers" on their more popular boards: to maintain stability when using several dimms.

I guess that's 'bout all I can say....I can't be certain about anything.