VIA's P4X266: The Pentium 4 gets DDR

Memory Latency: Things get Interesting

While we ran Cachemem's bandwidth tests, they didn't provide us with any new information outside of what Sandra already told us.  What was quite interesting was the latency of these three memory subsystems.

There was virtually no change in latency going from the i850 to the i845.  This could mean that the 850's dual channel RDRAM solution coupled with the Pentium 4's high clock speed truly hides RDRAM's latency.  It could also mean that the i845 was purposefully crippled by Intel since in theory, regular SDRAM should have a lower latency than RDRAM. 

The reason we have to believe that the i845's SDRAM controller was purposefully crippled is evident when you look at the winner of this benchmark: VIA's P4X266.  The P4X266 achieves a 15% lower latency with DDR SDRAM than Intel's 845 can pull off with regular SDRAM.  This is very impressive indeed, especially when you take into account that historically Intel has been the one with superior memory controllers.  This same very low latency memory controller should be present in the upcoming revision of the KT266 North Bridge. 

Do we even want Intel's DDR 845 platform to come out if it will be inherently crippled?

Now that you have an understanding for how these platforms compare in memory bandwidth and latency, let's get into the applications themselves.