I am reading information for a processorAMD FX-8320 Eight-Core
My primary question is why the L1 cache is not in the information. Would this imply that it does not have registers that it can access as quickly as a processor that does have L1 cache? Isn't that a big downside to this processor? It does however have somewhat larger L2 and L3 caches than other processors. But the L2 cache is given as 4 x 2MB
, does that mean it cannot use all 8MB
if the program is not multi-threaded?
Also, how is the clockrate reported? What I mean is the details report 3.5GHz, but is that by adding the cores together to give some theoretical maximum, or is that how fast each of the eight processors are? Just to be on the safe side.. I wouldn't want to buy the 8 core expecting up to 3.5 GHz on a linear program but in reality only getting around 400MB.