Posted on Monday, July 23 2012 @ 9:05 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
This week TechARP reveals the CPU Adjacent Sector Prefetch BIOS feature, you can learn about it
over here.
This is a BIOS feature specific to the Intel Pentium 4 or newer processors, including Intel Xeon processors.
When enabled, the processor will fetch the cache line containing the currently requested data, and prefetch the following cache line.
When disabled, the processor will only fetch the cache line containing the currently requested data.
In a desktop system, this improves the processor's performance since there's a high probability of the processor requiring the next cache line as well. It is recommended that you enable this BIOS feature in a desktop system.
But in a server, this feature may actually degrade performance since data requests in servers are of a more random nature. You will need to evaluate the performance effect of this feature on your server and determine if it should be disabled or enabled for better performance. But servers should generally disable this feature.
