- Aug 15, 2000
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From [/i] this review at Lost Circuits:
Dual Channel operation combines two physical DIMMs to a single 128 bit wide "Über-DIMM" which is seen by the chipset as a single row of memory. This naturally cuts the number of memory addresses available in half. While the wider bus results in higher bandwidth, it also causes higher redundancy and, by extension, less effective usage of the entire memory space. Combined with HyperThreading thread level parallelism, this can cause some problems in applications demanding high amounts of system memory. The easy workaround in this case, of course, is to use more memory which is kind of self-understood in the workstation class anyway. In other words, it almost appears as if 2GB of system memory are about the minimum requirement in order to not lose performance.
I wondered why memory scores in Sandra were not that impressive.
Dual Channel operation combines two physical DIMMs to a single 128 bit wide "Über-DIMM" which is seen by the chipset as a single row of memory. This naturally cuts the number of memory addresses available in half. While the wider bus results in higher bandwidth, it also causes higher redundancy and, by extension, less effective usage of the entire memory space. Combined with HyperThreading thread level parallelism, this can cause some problems in applications demanding high amounts of system memory. The easy workaround in this case, of course, is to use more memory which is kind of self-understood in the workstation class anyway. In other words, it almost appears as if 2GB of system memory are about the minimum requirement in order to not lose performance.
I wondered why memory scores in Sandra were not that impressive.