Cache vs. Mhz

[Wm E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <1990Jul25.030258.11568 at cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> chaiklin at cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Seth Chaiklin) writes:
| 
| I have a dilemma.  I must take either a 25 Mhz 386 machine
| with no cache or a 20 Mhz 386 machine with a 64K cache.

  Since anything which runs on the CPU uses the cahce (unless you turn
it off) the choice of o/s is not a problem. The choice of faster or
slower depends on your floating point use. If you are going to use a
coprocessor and do lots of f.p. you might see it faster with the 25MHz.
For almost any other application I would go with the 20MHz and cache.
The cache will give you about 15% improvement with a 1w/s memory. I
would be very sure whats happening if the 25MHz machine claims to be
0w/s, unless it is running fast interleaved memory.

  I don't think there will be a great deal of diference in performance
in these, oddly enough, so I doubt that you can make a seriously bad
decision.
-- 
bill davidsen - davidsen at sixhub.uucp (uunet!crdgw1!sixhub!davidsen)
    sysop *IX BBS and Public Access UNIX
    moderator of comp.binaries.ibm.pc and 80386 mailing list
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me