On Thu, 7 May 1998, Jose E. Dominguez wrote:

> I'm sure that someone more knowledgeable will explain the whole thing to us
> pretty soon. But for now I can tell you that the L2 cache has got nothing to do
> with it. I have a board with 512K cache and it supports 512MB RAM and all of it
> can be cached. The key is in the Tag RAM and the chipset. David G. explained
> this a while back. Perhaps he'll enlighten us again.

From a technical point, the PII can support more than 512MB Ram.
HOWEVER, it can only cache up to that 512.  This is one of the
shortcomings of the PII.  The pentium pro, however, can cache up to 4Gb of
ram.  The implications of this:  PII systems with more than 512 MB Ram may
experience "significant degradation in memory access and i/o speed" or so
a colleague at Intel put it to me.  I know some of the Dell poweredge
servers with the Pentium II are configurable w/ >512Mb RAM, but there is
also a note that the configuration with >512Mb, the 333MhZ processor is
the only option.  So, maybe this has changed with the newest series of
processors.

I'll have to check that one out.  The best solution for configurations
that require more than 512Mb still seems to be based on a MP PPro
platform.  My PPro 180MhZ kicks butt compared to another friends PII 333
as far as I/O is concerned.  His smokes mine when it comes to multimedia
stuff.  So, it's really a trade off!


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Lucas Starrett                    Electrical Engineering
229 South-West Complex       http://jarl.cs.uop.edu/~lstarret/
University of the Pacific
Stockton, CA 95211          I used to have a handle on life...
(209) 465-5518                     ...but it broke!
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