Memory Bandwidth and A64

[KingofFah]

Does anyone know whether the A64 and FX are going to be similar to the XP's in that they gain very little in pushing the FSB and memory clocks higher.
The XP was nowhere near as memory bandwidth hungry as the pentium. (if i remember right, at default fsb and 2100DDR, the xp used between 1700-1800 of that)

Just wondering if I will have to invest more money in faster DDR (I was going to get some PC3700 or 4000 for an intel setup, but I think ill wait until the newer A64 comes out). It would be nice to know if DS dual channel memory yields the same benfits on the A64 as it does in P4 setups.
It seems like the A64 is probably going to be able to utilize more memory and gain more from increased memory speeds because it is built in because it is built in now, but I doubt it will hit ridculous speeds like 550DDR.

If you have found a review covering these topics I would like a link, thanks.

 

[alexruiz]

The current memory champ is the Athlon FX 51 using registered RAM.... This should give an indication.

If there is a CPU that will scale the BEST with memory, the Athlon 64 family is. Higher clock speed means reduced latency. I posted a comment that if I were AMD, my memory controller should be able to go as high as 300 MHz (DDR600 or PC4800). there is already PC4300 (DDR533) so no need to get DDR2 until DDR2 has a significant lead.

 

[KingofFah]

I believe I have heard that DDR2 is supposed to release at DDR400 speed.

Anyway, I checked online while I was waiting for a response and saw some nice benchmarks of the opteron and A64 FX scaling very nicely in Sandra and also CPU intensive benchmarks.

Would I be right to assume that better performance would result from unregistered ram once that version of the FX is released (I believe registered ram increases latency)?

 

[Jeff7181]

The Athlon-64's memory controller is on die, as you know, so the faster you can run the CPU, the faster the memory controller will be... thus reducing latency as alex stated.
I think a lot of people are used to seeing HUGE gains from increasing memory bandwith on Intel processors because before the 800 Mhz bus and dual channel memory, the P4 was severely starved for memory bandwidth... now that things are caught up, it has all the memory bandwidth it needs.

And yes, as I understand it, non-registered memory performs better than registered.