Real Review of DDR Mobo

An anonymous reader sent us an overview of the AMD 760 chipset, and benchmarks to give some real numbers to DDR RAM. (10-15% speed increase over comparable SDRAM systems)

Comments

Re:Yay.

[substrate]

It would take more than a gentle or even vicious prod to RAM chip developers. Processor speeds are getting faster because of pipelining and architecture first and process technology second. The pipelining allows the CPU to trade off additional latency for a higher clock rate. It takes a little longer for the first result to come out but after that there is only an incremental delay before the next one. The performance gained by process improvement (improvements in silicon) are miniscule compared to the improvements due to architecture... except that process improvements have enabled the archictectual improvements (designers can cram more transistors onto a die, more wire etc)

Unfortunately RAM doesn't work that way. People don't want to trade off latency for overall throughput. RAMBUS traded off latency for throughput. It has theoretically higher throughput than SDRAM but more latency, as a result in a certain class of performance measurements it does significantly worse than SDRAM.

Meaningless article

[MobyDisk]

The final results here look like the old RDRAM tests - slower sometimes, faster other times, with no real conclusion. People gave up on RDRAM because it didn't deliver what it promised, results varied, and price was too high.
But these results make no sense. DDR has the same latency, higher bandwidth, but results in speed increases from -5% to +6%? It should be consistently faster, never slower