Many factors determine the ultimate performance of servers and workstations.
Three of these factors are processor speed, cache size, and cache speed. Understanding the interactions of these factors in system performance is vital in making informed purchasing decisions. This paper outlines the role each of these factors plays in system performance and shows benchmark results for several application environments. For years, processor speed has been used as an indicator of system performance - the faster the processor, the faster the system. In some cases, this was an accurate assessment, and in other cases it was not.