LOL_Wut_Axel
Diamond Member
- Mar 26, 2011
- 4,310
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The clock speed of the 2100 is not 19% higher. It is 11% higher.
My source is just as valid as yours; Intel clearly states that it supports the same instruction sets.
11% loss of performance to clock speed. 20-30% loss of performance to lack of HT.
Those factors alone place the Pentium at anywhere from 62.3% to 71.2% the performance of the i3. That would average out to 66.75% the performance of the i3, making the i3 almost EXACTLY 50% faster on average.
Now, that's all in an ideal situation. Clock speeds don't scale linearly and HT doesn't offer the 20-30% performance boost that Intel advertises.
Also, the Pentium may lose more performance from cache loss for obvious reasons.
I have 8GB of RAM in my PC. If I pulled out 4GB, I wouldn't see any real difference in performance. If I pulled 2GB from that, I'd take a decent hit to performance. If I took 1GB from that, I'd take a very significant hit to performance.
That's not exactly the same concept, though I do see what you're trying to say. In any case, it's extremely unlikely that the extra 1MB L3 cache will give it a performance boost of 11-15%. Most of the differences from the 2500K and 2100, if you look at the reviews, are because of the extra cores in the 2500K, and the higher clock speed.
Maybe someone could chime in. It'd be interesting to see the performance difference, if any, from the 2500K with two cores turned off. Then we could directly compare the difference that comes from having 4MB L3 and 6MB L3. I doubt it would be anywhere near 11-15%, though. It's not like the Pentium is cache starved, since it has 3MB L3 cache.