I think the "1 GB/s" was taken from a comment in the original review on Bare Feats. There was an "explanation" posted from a reader that made the bogus claim that the memory bandwidth was limited to 1 GB/s even in the models with a 166MHz system bus. I notice that the revised Bare Feats report has removed that whole section.
Anyway, the thing that stands out about these benchmarks is that the new dual 1GHz has a system bus (and memory bandwidth) that is 25% faster than the old one, yet this made no discernable difference in these particular benchmarks. This isn't surprising considering that these are CPU-intensive tests, but the bizarre thing is the number of people who are claiming that this somehow proves that the DDR implementation is useless, a fraud, etc. etc. They seem to think these benchmarks would improve dramatically if the DDR bandwidth was passed on to the CPUs.
This isn't logical. Why would a real 25% improvement in memory bandwidth have no influence at all on the benchmarks, yet a 100% improvement which would come from a "real DDR" implementation suddenly make a big difference.
The results of these particular benchmarks would be the same because they are CPU intensive tasks and therfore are bound by CPU speed. (That is, for these tasks much more time is spent in CPU processing that in reading or writing memory). There's no magic change Apple could make in other parts of the system that will make 1GHz CPUs process faster than 1GHz.
That isn't to say that the 166MHz system bus and the DDR implementation Apple is using isn't advantageous in generaly system usage, it is just to say that these benchmarks will not reveal those advantages.
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I think the "1 GB/s" was taken from a comment in the original review on Bare Feats. There was an "explanation" posted from a reader that made the bogus claim that the memory bandwidth was limited to 1 GB/s even in the models with a 166MHz system bus. I notice that the revised Bare Feats report has removed that whole section.
Anyway, the thing that stands out about these benchmarks is that the new dual 1GHz has a system bus (and memory bandwidth) that is 25% faster than the old one, yet this made no discernable difference in these particular benchmarks. This isn't surprising considering that these are CPU-intensive tests, but the bizarre thing is the number of people who are claiming that this somehow proves that the DDR implementation is useless, a fraud, etc. etc. They seem to think these benchmarks would improve dramatically if the DDR bandwidth was passed on to the CPUs.
This isn't logical. Why would a real 25% improvement in memory bandwidth have no influence at all on the benchmarks, yet a 100% improvement which would come from a "real DDR" implementation suddenly make a big difference.
The results of these particular benchmarks would be the same because they are CPU intensive tasks and therfore are bound by CPU speed. (That is, for these tasks much more time is spent in CPU processing that in reading or writing memory). There's no magic change Apple could make in other parts of the system that will make 1GHz CPUs process faster than 1GHz.
That isn't to say that the 166MHz system bus and the DDR implementation Apple is using isn't advantageous in generaly system usage, it is just to say that these benchmarks will not reveal those advantages.
- Dennis D.