Posted on Friday, June 23 2006 @ 0:06 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Inquirer reports that early Kentsfield benchmarks reveal evidence of bus saturation:
However looking at the benchmarks reveals evidence of the dreaded bus saturation – AMD’s justification for direct connect. With two cores, the two products are fed with similar amounts of data, but moving up to four cores AMD’s solution scales up better.
Even with the logistical nightmare of AMD’s architecture (you need at least four DIMMs to deliver the best performance) it is a big advantage.
Compare Kentsfield to AMD's 4x4: on a 1066MHz bus the Intel socket has 8.5GB/s available. This isn’t a problem for dual core chips, but stick two Conroes onto a module, then bandwidth drops to a miserly 2.1GB/s per core – the equivalent of just one stick of DDR266, and with higher latency!
So here’s the killer – each 4x4 core will receive over three times the bandwidth of its Kentsfield equivalent.
More details about Kentsfield over
here.
