
4.2 System Processing 197
Chapter 4
Of course, the benefit of the cache will largely depend upon the likeli-
hood of getting a “cache-hit,” i.e., for the processor to execute a cached
instruction or use cached data—remember also that a thread execution
(context) held at one point by a processor, might be scheduled on another
processor for its next quantum of execution: this results in the cache not
being as useful because of the general distribution of threads across several
processors. In short, the largest is not necessarily delivering the best perfor-
mance improvement, and probably not in the scale of the additional cost.
While large L2/L3 cache is ...