Someone posted that one-liner during a discussion on a mailing list a few weeks back. I had heard similar phrases, and now I think I have a taste of why.

OK, nobody’s perfect. You get a group together and it amplifies the effect. If anyone follows Apple and particularly the PowerBook innovations, they remember all of the hype about the 1MB L3 cache that was on the 17″ PowerBook. Folks running Virtual PC were very excited to hear that a big boost was to be expected when running a guest OS on this very successful emulator.

Well, as it turns out, Apple must have decided it was not a very good idea. The second version of the 17″ PowerBooks (those with the ATI video card and a 1.33GHz G4 processor) now have the same L2 cache as the 15″ PowerBooks, and all this without much mention of it.

This is significant to me only because it is a key factor in my troubles with getting Debian Linux to run on my 1GHz 17″ PowerBook. It turns out that booting into a benh kernel requires one to pass a parameter to turn off the L3 cache, which in turn creates a separate set of serious issues.

I suppose this is one case where straddling the cutting edge of technology has led to a fairly severe papercut.

8^)