ServerWorks HEsl: DDR bandwidth without DDR SDRAM

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Click Here for a description of Business Winstone 2001

You wouldn't expect us to start off the performance analysis of a high-end multiprocessor chipset with scores from Business Winstone, but with the new 2001 version of the benchmark the tests are actually quite useful to analyzing overall system performance.

As with most Winstone benchmarks, Business Winstone 2001 is still mainly disk limited, resulting in the relatively small performance differences that you see here. The fact that we used such a high performance SCSI drive in the test systems however does help to minimize some of the effects of this limitation.

Without too much surprise, the i840 chipset comes out holding up the rear in this test. The reasons are fairly simple; remember that out of the three memory types compared here (PC133, PC2100 DDR and PC800 RDRAM) the i840's dual channel PC800 RDRAM has the highest overall latency.

With the types of applications that Business Winstone 2001 switches through, the 1.06GB/s of memory bandwidth allowed for by the PC133 specification is generally enough and won't limit the performance of the system. In fact, business applications will prefer low latency operation to high bandwidth solutions provided that they are given enough memory bandwidth to start with. For this reason we see that the i840, with its 3.2GB/s of memory bandwidth is approximately 3% slower than the two VIA solutions: the DDR based Apollo Pro 266 and the PC133 SDRAM based Apollo Pro 133A.

It's interesting to see that the ServerSet III HEsl takes an early lead in a benchmark that we just finished saying didn't really take advantage of much memory bandwidth. Luckily the HEsl has the best of both worlds, the latency of PC133 SDRAM combined with the bandwidth of PC2100 DDR SDRAM giving it the 6.5% advantage over the i840 and a small 3% performance advantage over the two VIA solutions.

While Business Winstone 2001 isn't a benchmark that is representative of what the HEsl chipset is best at, it's a good starting point because there will be some situations where the HEsl is doubling as a high-performance workstation as well as a personal system and there's no reason that the chipset should not be able to handle such "simple" tasks.