Data compression is a task which is among the most sensitive to the size of the L2 cache. As you can see, this size matters much in WinRAR.
The size of the L2 cache becomes almost unimportant at all in media encoding tasks. The processor with the maximum amount of L2 cache memory is just 1-2% faster than the Sempron with a 128KB L2 cache.
It抯 similar in ScienceMark which models the thermodynamic condition of a substance with molecular dynamics methods. The speed at which processors of K8 architecture perform calculations of such type depends but little on the size of the L2 cache.
The Athlon 64 with the biggest cache performs the final rendering in 3ds max 7 faster, but only by 2.5%, than the Sempron of the same frequency but with 128KB of cache.
Summing up the results of these tests we should acknowledge that the reduction of the cache memory to 128 kilobytes in processors of K8 architecture doesn抰 affect the performance too much. In our tests the processor with a 128KB L2 cache is in average only 1.2% slower than its analog with twice the size of the cache and less than 6% slower than the model with an L2 cache of the maximum size. Thus, you shouldn抰 worry about the small amount of cache memory when choosing a Sempron for your Socket 754 system.
Yet you should also be aware that the negative effect from the reduction of the size of the L2 cache is felt more acutely in games. Calculations-heavy, rendering and media processing applications run almost as fast on processors with a reduced L2 cache as on their full-fledged analogs.
