RAM - Memory Technology Overview

Closing Thoughts

All the talk of latencies and timings will hopefully have helped everyone to realize that while the two major factors in overall performance of RAM are its bandwidth and the CAS latency, the other timings' impact can vary from being negligible to having a moderate influence on performance. Higher latencies can be overcome in many instances by improved bandwidth, provided that the system is designed with this goal - it is but one of the many design decisions that must be made, often years in advance. Demands are dependent on the application being used, of course, but in general, graphics-intensive operations demand a lot of bandwidth, office applications benefit more from latency, and games tend to want both.

With the large number of memory types available, not to mention chipsets, it can be very difficult to understand how everything fits together. We will provide more detailed comparisons in part two of this series, where we will look at a variety of past, present and future memory technologies. Stay tuned!