🚀 go-pugleaf

Paul A. Lane (palane@iastate.edu) wrote:
: With the various discussion about the PC Magazine reviews, I looked a
: bit more closely at the company/product profiles. Specifically, I was
: looking for differences between the Tri-Star and Gateway machines which
: might cause a difference in performance. [An aside here. The Gateway
: 2000 uses a Western Digital hard drive while Tri-Star use a Maxtor. 
: This might explain part of the difference.]
: 
: When examining the cache, I noted that the Tri-Star has a 256K cache,
: while the Gateway uses a 64K SRAM cache. When I started looking at
: other vendors, I noticed that many had a cache of a given size while
: others used an SRAM cache.
: 
: I'm a bit curious. I know that the primary requirement for a memory cache
: is that its rated speed must be less than the recipricol of the clock
: speed (e.g., 25MHz needs 40ns memory,). I wasn't aware that any kind of
: memory except for static RAM (SRAM) was capable of this kind of performance.
: 
: So, here's the question. Is there any differene between a cache using SRAM
: or one which doesn't (assuming identical size and design otherwise)?
: 
: Paul Lane
: 
: