Quote Originally Posted by Xiahou
Im not sure how true that is anyway.... sure architectures were improved along with clock speeds, but there were no great leaps in cache size that Im aware of.

I mean, you can easily google the specs for various processors and see that cache sizes have fluctuated, but certainly havent increased in "lockstep" with processor speeds. The P2 had what, 256KB of L2 cache at say 300Mhz? If there was a "lockstep" you'd expect a 3Ghz processor to have a L2 of over 2.5MB, yet this isnt the case- most have caches only around 512KB to 1MB. In fact, I believe my old Athlon tbird still only had 256KB of L2.
The point I'm making is that it has never been just a clock speed race and cache has generally always kept up with the core especially recently. So the emphasis on cache didn't just happen recently. I should've phrased it as cache improvements (instead of just size) to take into account all the cache tweaks as well

The P2 did have 256/512k of cache. But improvements like off-die vs on-die, full vs half speed, associativity, bus width, trace cache were also implemented in later cpu's so cache performance wasn't ignored.

With AMD, cache sizes dropped with the A64's but so did clock speeds because of core tweaks.