When Intel went to the on chip L2 cache it was not to increase performance, it was to save money. They cut the size of the cache from 512 Kb to 256 Kb. My old Pentium 2 L2 cache tested at half of the L1 cache speed, which it is supposed to be. With my Pentium 3 (1.26 Ghz with 512 Kb L2 cache) the L2 cache tests at 60% of L1 cache speed, not 100% as Intel would have you believe.

Steve Wolfe wrote:

There *can* be an advantage, but whether it's important to you is
debatable. Early P3's had the same cache architecture as the P2's -
namely, external cache running at half of the CPU's clock speed. Starting
around the 600 MHz mark, you were able to get P3's with on-die cache
running at full CPU speed.

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Mike Walsh
West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S.A.