Intel’s Core architecture is the performance leader of today and in a previous article we investigated the performance impact of L2 cache with Intel’s dual-core models. Our processor guru Robert ‘crotale’ Kihlberg has taken a look at Intel’s quad-core family, Core 2 Quad, to see what kind of impact the processor bus has on the overall performance. Intel’s architecture has been criticized for its processor bus and with four cores hungry for data the bus becomes even more crucial. In this article we investigate how much the bus speed really matters and what we can expect from future processors with a higher FSB;
“Back then we concluded that such a solution could be bottlenecked when the processor sends data between the two pairs of cores. This information is namely sent through the common system bus, which is a lot slower than a direct path between cores in the same die. This also means that the performance should improve if we raise the system bus, also known as the FSB. That is precisely what we’re going to investigate in this article, and we will not settle for just comparing 266 MHz and 333 MHz FSB.”
