Chapter 1 System Overview
Hippo DCA2 User’s Manual
5
is large enough, the L2 cache is kept filled with data on a continuous basis. It is the
maintenance of this traffic flow that dramatically reduces the amount of time the CPU
would otherwise have for executing software instructions.
1.13
Dynamicache Excels and External Cache Suffers Under Heavy Processing
Loads
Heavy processing loads can easily reduce a 66Mhz CPU and L2 cache combination to
effective processing speeds as little as 20% of the CPU’s capabilities. A CPU under these
circumstances spends as much as 80% of its time squeezing large amounts of data to and
from memory through a very small SRAM cache. External cache, under these high stress
conditions is kept in a continuous state of flux. This is the point at which a cache
mechanism ceases to be effective in providing any benefit to system performance.
This is the state in which the cache has become saturated. If the processing demands from
the CPU increase any further, the external cache actually creates a penalty in performance
by virtue of it’s memory management overhead. DynamiCache does not suffer from these
penalties.
1.14
Targeted Operating Environments
DCA2 is designed with the following target operating systems, and application
environments:
Multitasking Mutlithreding ( Windows 3.11, Windows NT, OS/2 2.11, etc.)
Large Applications ( Desktop publishers, graphic designers, databases/spreadsheets )
I/O Intensive computing ( Graphics applications, multimedia, disk and data transfers )
CPU Bound Computing ( CAD/CAM, MATHCad and other scientific number crunchers )
Software Compilers
Application Servers ( Networked applications accessed from a central server )
File Servers ( Novel, Lantastic, LANManager, Vines )
DynamiCache is fully compatible with all the major operating systems and
application.
