Access time is a a function of areal density, not unlike hard drives. Plus access logic increases at least logarithmic to the number of lines in the cache, so you’re probably looking at in the neighborhood of 50% slower for every doubling of L1 cache size.
Now as to why cache sizes didn’t increase much once clock speeds stagnated and feature size continued to decline, I couldn’t say. But L3 caches didn’t used to exist, and L2 has gotten bigger.
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Access time is a a function of areal density, not unlike hard drives. Plus access logic increases at least logarithmic to the number of lines in the cache, so you’re probably looking at in the neighborhood of 50% slower for every doubling of L1 cache size.
Now as to why cache sizes didn’t increase much once clock speeds stagnated and feature size continued to decline, I couldn’t say. But L3 caches didn’t used to exist, and L2 has gotten bigger.