Pale Moon and CPU cache

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Utnapishtim
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Pale Moon and CPU cache

Unread post by Utnapishtim » 2023-03-16, 18:54

My PC is getting really long in the tooth now so I'm in the market for a new one. I've noticed Ryzen now sells some CPUs in versions ("X3D") with more L3 cache, supposed to be good for gaming.

Pale Moon can be kind of slow for me, and I think it's because I run too many tabs (I use Lull The Tabs but I've got a jillion tabs), but also because Pale Moon seems to only use 1-2 cores. So I guess I should be ignoring the core count and looking for the highest frequencies. But I'm also thinking that PM is about complicated enough that it could benefit from the extra 64 MB in the L3 cache.

Do you guys think it's worth taking a 200-300MHz frequency hit for extra CPU cache? Has anyone done comparisons with this sort of thing? The X and X3D versions seem about the same for everything else I'd be using this PC for, PM performance would be the tiebreaker.

(I found this thread from 2013 on TH forums: https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads ... e.1372142/ - somebody saying that an i3-3000 is overkill for web browsing... those were the times :D)

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Re: Pale Moon and CPU cache

Unread post by pale guru » 2023-03-16, 22:42

The only scenario where CPU cache really matters (in my experience) is when you do video coding. In a few scenarios, my Ryzen 3700 with 32 MB L3 cache can reach almost double the speed of the 5750G (16 MB L3 cache, with integrated graphics).

On the other hand, from performance tests I read the integrated graphics (on Ryzen CPUs) can be much faster in usual 2D graphics scenarios like using Pale Moon as browser.
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Re: Pale Moon and CPU cache

Unread post by Moonchild » 2023-03-16, 22:57

I have no data to say one way or another, but in many respects Pale Moon is like a modern game. It uses 2D and 3D to compose pages and accelerate windows, it is highly multi-threaded with many parallel processes and in general a very complex piece of software. I can easily imagine that 3dvcache on the X3D processors is going to have a significant effect, but I may also be wrong. In general for a piece of software that handles a lot of data (and Pale Moon does do that) a roomy L3 cache is going to be beneficial.
Of course all of this depends on many factors as Pale Moon in itself does not do anything specific to work with CPU caches, so any effect will depend on the operating layers below the level at which Pale Moon operates.
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Re: Pale Moon and CPU cache

Unread post by Utnapishtim » 2023-03-17, 00:19

FWIW I was mainly looking at 5800X and 5800X3D (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen?use ... Ryzen_5000), one has 32 MB and the other 96 MB. However 5800X3D has quite a bit lower speed, 3.4/4.5 GHz vs 3.8/4.7 for 5800X or even 3.7/4.6 for 5600X. In the 7000 generation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen?use ... Ryzen_7000) the differences look a lot smaller, but I don't think I want to buy DDR5 yet

In any case it's a hefty improvement from my current machine's glorious 6 MB

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