Rambus DRAM Part 2: Performance

Even High End Winstone 2000, which you would think would go to the 840 platform, was actually faster on the BX at 133MHz. With this level of bandwidth usage, there is no need for any higher bandwidth memory solutions. Unfortunately things won't always remain like this, as the next generation of applications and games promise to be much more demanding than what we currently benchmark with.

The Dual Processor Inspection tests under Winstone 99 are simply a set of multithreaded tests that work on both single and dual processor systems and are designed to illustrate any performance advantage that is present when moving to an SMP setup. The tests also serve our purpose as they stress the memory subsystem fairly nicely.

Once again, our Intel OR840 board which we used for the 840/PC800 RDRAM tests managed to fall behind the 820/PC800 RDRAM setup indicating that the 840's memory bandwidth advantage wasn't of any use in the tests. While we won't be able to say the same thing 8 - 10 months from now, for today's users, this helps to illustrate the point that having a lot of memory bandwidth isn't absolutely necessary and not always the key to greater performance.