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Athlon 64 X2: New Memory Dividers and Multitasking Performance
Posted by: Newsfactory on: 08/13/2005 04:10 PM [ Print | 1 comment(s) ] · 3398 views
AMD was faced with a tradeoff during the development of the dual core Athlon 64 X2. In order to maintain backwards compatibility with earlier Socket-939 motherboards, they could not change the pinout of their dual core processors.
While maintaining the same pinout resulted in the ability to upgrade virtually any Socket-939 platform to a dual core Athlon 64 X2, it meant that the dual core processors were left with no more memory bandwidth than their single core counterparts. The single-core Socket-939 Athlon 64s feature a 128-bit wide DDR memory controller, which when operating at DDR400 speeds, it gives the A64 a maximum of 6.4GB/s of memory bandwidth. Sharing the same memory controller, the dual core Athlon 64 X2s also feature the same 6.4GB/s of memory bandwidth, despite the fact that there are now twice as many cores vying for the same amount of memory bandwidth.
AnandTech
While maintaining the same pinout resulted in the ability to upgrade virtually any Socket-939 platform to a dual core Athlon 64 X2, it meant that the dual core processors were left with no more memory bandwidth than their single core counterparts. The single-core Socket-939 Athlon 64s feature a 128-bit wide DDR memory controller, which when operating at DDR400 speeds, it gives the A64 a maximum of 6.4GB/s of memory bandwidth. Sharing the same memory controller, the dual core Athlon 64 X2s also feature the same 6.4GB/s of memory bandwidth, despite the fact that there are now twice as many cores vying for the same amount of memory bandwidth.
AnandTech
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Comment
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ewwhww01 Unregistered |
#61956 Posted on: 08/13/2005 09:02 PM
Kind of misleading. By clicking on the AnadTech link, just scroll down and you will see this is not a problem. "Luckily for AMD, the single core Athlon 64 was not very memory bandwidth limited, and thus, the move to dual core still allowed AMD to scale relatively well. In fact, based on the results that we saw in our Athlon 64 X2 3800+ review, AMD continues to consistently scale better from one to two cores than Intel, despite the reduction in memory bandwidth per core. " |
