For comparison: POWER6 is 32mb. Large caches are becoming one of the largest performance wins on processors as I/O bottlenecks become more severe. By all good

For comparison: POWER6 is 32mb. Large caches are becoming one of the largest performance wins on processors as I/O bottlenecks become more severe. By all good estimates it's only maybe 4-10 years before we have to worry about straight up running out of pins on the chips. (We can put more cores in 'em, but we actually will have a really hard time scaling down the pins that connect the die to the rest of the computer, so this will be another I/O bottleneck. The die is going to need as much cache as we can give it.)