Upgradable cache?

Hello! just thinking wide...

is there a way to upgrade system cache? for the CPU i mean.. or does the Motherboard have one too?

I see that the lower end lappies have only 1mb cache and the better ones have up to 4mb(as i've seen) of cache....

so just wondering if its upgradable...

and cache is just like ram? stores information for later use by the CPU?

Hypothetically: if i had two CPU's and everything but the cache was different, one having 1mb cache and the other having 4mb cache, the cpu with 1mb cache is automatically inferior? -that cache is incredibly important and has a massive impact on system performance.

 

Umm...no, the cache is built directly into the processor die.

Cache is kind of like RAM, only it is used by the processor to store as much as possible inside of the cache to avoid needing to access the 'much slower' RAM.

 

much slower ram... is the speed the 1mb(cache) Versus the 533mhz(RAM[typical speed])???

 

The cache is blazing fast compared to the RAM. That's why it's there.

 

As to your hypothetical question, no different CPU's use cache different. AMD is less reliant on it, but at the same time how do you define? The AMD have twice the L1 cache as the Intel's. There is no answer to your question or assumption. But at this point C2D beat anything clock for clock on the consumer notebook market.

Edit: No you can't upgrade.

 

The reason for the difference in L2 between Intel and AMD is because Intel's Core 2 Duo's have the cache as a separate part, utilized by both cores, while AMD integrates the cache into their chips and has a dedicated cache to each core.

 

The reason that you don't have a lot of Cache, because it's less dense (takes more space for the same size) and it's considerably more expensive than RAM.

 

And the reason you have cache at all is that it's hundreds of times faster than RAM.

And one of the reasons it's so fast is that it's physically a part of the CPU. So it can't be replaced or upgraded.