Rambus DRAM Part 2: Performance

Once again, the low latency SDRAM and the BX's high performing memory controller combined with the 1.06GB/s of memory bandwidth provided by the 133MHz memory bus keeps the advantage in the 440BX's court.

The Detonator 5.16 drivers improve performance on the VIA 133A chipset giving it the advantage over the workstation i840 platform with its dual channel RDRAM. This is a perfect example where the peak bandwidth (3.2GB/s) of the i840's RDRAM channels is meaningless because the bandwidth utilization in this particular case isn't high enough to take advantage of it.

In this case and in most of the benchmarks we ran, latency matters more than peak bandwidth.

The limitation here lies outside of the system memory which explains the relatively small performance difference that exists between the slowest i840/PC100 combo and the fastest BX133/PC133 setup.