> >Much more.
> >
> >The latency difference seems to be on the order of 100000 times.
> >It is the latency we care about because that determines how long
> >the CPU cannot do anything useful but has to wait.
>
> And if you look at the ratio between the access time of ram which is in
> the low nanoseconds (1* 10 ^ -9) ... and compare it to the seek +
> rotational delay of a discrete spindal which is in low milliseconds (1*
> 10 ^ -3) that puts you at a ratio of about 1000000.
Indeed.
Now imagine one in every million memory accesses results in
a major page fault ... your computer would run at 1/2 speed.
The difference between a 99.999% hit rate and 99.9999% hit
rate becomes rather important with these latency ratios ;)
regards,
Rik
-- Bravely reimplemented by the knights who say "NIH".http://www.surriel.com/ http://distro.conectiva.com/
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