Getting Cache Back . . .

The enterprising folks at Overclockers.ru (summary in English here) have found that these new Duron do come with 256K cache, and that AMD merely snips a bridge to knock out 192K of that.

Well, they immediately proceded to undo the snip, and voila, they had a Duron with 256K cache. Well, sometimes. They had one that didn’t work.

This seems to indicate that Durons consist of those CPUs cache-castrated for the sake of castration, and those castrated because there is actually something wrong with part of the cache.

XBit Labs points out that Thortons might be turned into Bartons using the same trick. Provided AMD doesn’t hide the bridges, something like this is likely to work.

The way to do that is to get your hands on a Thorton, compare it to a Barton, and see how they differ (outside of those areas like multipliers where we already know there’s a difference).

It should be noted, though, that in either case, you’ll likely be playing for low stakes; saving $30 or less if it works, having to undo the work if it doesn’t, and taking the chance of ending up with a pretty useless processor if you can’t.

If you can already lock and unlock bridges with your eyes closed, big deal. If doing this is more a matter of hobbying entertainment than anything else, that’s also fine.

But if you haven’t done this or anything like it before, and you can’t afford to lose the CPU; the gain isn’t worth the risk.

Ed

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