VIA’s KT133A Socket-A Chipset: AMD 760 Performance without DDR SDRAM

Linpack Performance – Is DDR SDRAM Necessary?

The question we posed earlier in this article was whether or not the Linpack performance increase that the AMD 760 chipset exhibited came mostly from the 133MHz FSB or the use of PC2100 DDR SDRAM.  If our assumptions were true about the nature of the Athlon’s architecture than the majority of the performance increase came from the 133MHz FSB.  There’s only one way to find out, let’s have a look at the Linpack graph including the KT133A at 133/133MHz (FSB/Memory Bus). 

This is the same graph we showed earlier on with one new addition, the neon green line represents the Athlon running at a 133MHz FSB but still using PC133 SDRAM.  If you look carefully towards the end of the graph where the data is larger than the Athlon’s caches, the KT133A is almost as fast as the AMD 760 and it is only using PC133 SDRAM. 

In fact, the AMD 760 with PC2100 DDR SDRAM only comes out approximately 8% faster than the KT133A while it is 50% faster than the regular KT133.  This indicates that 42% of the performance boost the AMD 760 showed us the first time around was due to the 133MHz FSB and not DDR SDRAM.

That’s fine for theoretical benchmarks, but what about in real world tests?