DDR SDRAM & Athlon Specs

Mr. Wong writes "We've finally got some solid benchmarks of DDR SDRAM on an AMD Athlon. Rambus better watch out, DDR looks solid." As well, check out this submission: ph4t1dck writes "Anandtech managed to get a hold of an Athlon motherboard with support for DDR memory and then proceeded to put it through its paces. Looks like this could spell big trouble for Intel & Rambus since the Athlon with DDR seems to be destroying the P3 with RDRAM. It'll be interesting to see how the P4 fares in all this with its 400 mhz front side bus."

Comments

Almost there...

[BrK]

If I had a nickle for every time some new product announcment "spelled trouble" for Intel, I'd be retired now. I certainly hope that as new things emerge Intel's death grip on the PeeCee market will erode, but we can only hope. Sometimes I think that the g33k culture gets too excited over things like this, not realizing that Joe Consumer generally doesn't know squat about what's in his box, and is more concerned with what software is pre-loaded, or what kind of speakers come with his new PeeCee. Not to mention that sales to businesses dwarf end-user sales (and the DIY PeeCee builders are less than noise in the equation), we have to ask "Does that make $en$e to the corporate buyers?". If big business endorses it, it will succeed. If Dell/Compaq/Micron/etc don't package this hardware properly, then the Intel/Rambus camp may continue to succeed in spite of its inferior performance.

Here's why ....

[taniwha]

Athlon has a 200MHz system bus (really 100 but they move data on both edges of the clock). On the other hand the PC100 memory systems only make ata at 1/2 this rate - this means that great bus is starved for performance and stuff must wait - even with PC133 it has to wait for the memory - to make matters worse K7 has cache lines that are twice as long - it has to wait twice as long as an Intel part - now with a 2x memory system and bus the latency for k7 is the same as that for a Pentium (latency is king for reads) and twice as much data is transfered to boot

In other words K7's been crippled by its memory subsystem from day 1 -it's only now you will start to see it running at full speed ....

P-III vs Athlon = Pointless

[um... Lucas]

The P-III is at the end of it's life... it seems rather pointless to compare it's performance versus the Athlon any longer. In most cases, for this generation, the Athlon either provided superior performance, or at least equal performance, while costing a fraction of what an Intel chip would have costed...

With the P-IV on it's way and having a TON of architectural changes to itself and the rest of the subsystems, any comparison of the P-III vs Athlon should be disregarded come the Pentium 4.

I'm not AMD bashing - i've got an Athlon 700 system enroute to me as I type this, but P-3 vs Athlon seems to be beating a dead horse at this point in the game.

Re:P-III vs Athlon = Pointless

[platos_beard]

"a TON or architectural changes" ???

I tought it was the HEAT SINK that was a TON.

Direct Links to Benchmark Pages

[John_Booty]

Anand's site seems to be Slashdotted or something. Sometimes the pages come up and sometimes they don't.

Since pulling up any given page on Anand's site right now is sort of a crapshoot, and the benchmarks start on PAGE 8 or so of the review, you might want to jump straight to the benchmarks... here's the link...

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.h tml?i=1319&p=8

Just change the "p=8" to "p=9" or something to jump to page 9 instead of 8... gotta love those excessively-paginated articles to boost those ad hit rates.... :-D

Yep. They're also all foreign companies

[Tridus]

All of the settlements I have heard of so far were foreign companies who have a track record of not really fighting american companies in american courts anyway.

That changes with Micron, who have far more of a level playing field.

They're the ones we should be watching. Micron has the best chance of winning. If they do, that will quickly turn things around and these settlements will stop happening. If they settle, well, then everybody who is left is likely to.

Re:East Germany?

[Anonymous Coward]

But I thought East Germany no longer existed. Yet they are making RAM Chips?

Yes, you are correct, they DID get rid of East Germany. Germany now has no Eastern region, as during the German re-unification a relativistic spatial contraction was performed upon the German landmass, thus compressing Germany into a two-dimensional region. Under EU law, this sort of national compression is legal, and is totally unobservable by the residents of Germany.

Unfortunately, the huge area of Europe which was formerly occupied by the three-dimensional Germany is now a dangerous void. Anyone who falls into the aforementioned void will instantly be sucked into a parallel world of frightening paradoxes such as "What if I killed my own Grandfather?" and "If God made the world, then who made God?".

People who happen to fall into this void are forced into an infinite lifetime of hard labour, where they are forced to make RAM chips from ear wax and their own anal hair. Once a week, a huge space cockroach called Tarquin descends into the void to harvest the RAM chips. The RAM chips are then distributed (by supernatural means) to shops around the world where customers may purchase them. This is how East Germany manufactures RAM.

Thank you.

Re:When do GHz chips get cheap (== under $500)?

[ackthpt]

More to the (OT) point, AMD is more responsible for Intel's dropping prices. They may regard AMD as an mere imitator, but they certainly are reacting to AMD, which speaks volumes.

DDR will be a good thing when we have a number of chipsets and motherboards to choose from. Fortunately for us, TaiwanInc. will have a number of these available by the end of the year, so we don't have to wait for Intel to "invent" it.

Vote Naked 2000