Rambus DRAM Part 2: Performance

SYSMark 2000 used to be a benchmark completely dominated by the i820 + RDRAM platform, but a few changes have taken place since the benchmark's introduction.

One of the most important changes is that CAS2 PC133 SDRAM has become available that allows the Apollo Pro 133A to pull ahead of the i820 + RDRAM platform.

If you look back at that latency vs bandwidth graph we used earlier, SYSMark 2000 would be a perfect example of where the BX/PC100 and i820/RDRAM lines overlap and where the i840/PC800 and VIA 133A/PC133 lines overlap as well.

The BX chipset at 133MHz comes out on top, which we predicted earlier because of the low latency of SDRAM in low bandwidth usage situations and because of the excellent SDRAM memory controller found in the BX's North Bridge.

Here the BX and Apollo Pro 133A setups fell to the bottom of the performance chart while the RDRAM equipped 840 and 820 platforms and the dual channel SDRAM i840 platform managed to come out on top.