| JEMC said: His comments about the latency have picked my interest, although I don't know how that translates in the real world, performance wise. |
What it really comes down to is the impact a cache miss will have on performance of a CPU ...
When a program is running and all the code and data are in the CPU's cache it can run at (nearly) the theoritical maximum performance; but when it needs something that is in main memory that "path" of code is haulted until the data/code can be fetched from main memory and loaded into cache. The latency (effectively) means the amount of time it takes to load this data/code from memory into cache.
You can reduce the likelihood of a cache miss by having more cache (which the Wii U CPU is rumoured to have), and you can reduce the penalty of this cache miss by reducing the latency of the memory (which is what they're claiming), and if you do both you can increase the real world performance of a CPU dramatically without impacting its theoritical performance.
Ultimately, you can get a similar result by just buying a more powerful/expensive/hotter CPU but that really isn't Nintendo's style; if you want the best performance per dollar (or Watt) you really have to focus on increasing real world performance.
