512KB Cache: Is It Really That Bad?

Most computer enthusiasts will hardly take dual-core Celeron seriously because of its considerably less attractive features than those of the top processors. The biggest cause for concern poses extremely small L2 cache: even Pentium E2000 processors with 1MB L2 cache yield considerably to fully-fledged Core 2 Duo CPUs in some applications. So, what can we expect from Celeron that has an even smaller 512KB L2 cache? To estimate how the dramatic reduction of the L2 cache size affects the performance of dual-core processors on Core micro-architecture, we undertook a small test involving Core 2 Duo E6850 processor compared against dual-core Celeron working at the same clock frequency (3.0GHz = 9 x 333MHz).

It is true, 8 times smaller L2 cache does have a serious effect on the performance. It is especially noticeable in games, where dual-core Celeron turns out more than 1.5 times slower than its competitor, or to be more exact – 36.6% slower. However, besides games there are very few tasks where the budget processor falls behind as dramatically. For example, a CPU with 512KB L2 cache is only 15% slower than the CPU with a 4MB L2 cache during final rendering. In audio and video content encoding tasks the situation is even better: Celeron running at 3GHz speed is only 7% behind Core 2 Duo E6850.

In other words, smaller cache memory is far not a universal means of reducing the performance. While in some applications the performance may drop significantly, other ones hardly feel it at all. That is why Celeron has not only smaller L2 cache but also lower clock frequency. These two measures taken at the same time ensure that the performance of this budget processor will be much lower than that of the mainstream solution.

On the other hand, overclocking may make up for lower clock frequency. And as a result, the new dual-core Celeron processor may still become a pretty attractive choice for some type of applications that we are going to single out in the next section of our review.