Athlon 64 Revision E: Unofficial DDR500 Support

Final Words

Based on the tests that we’ve seen here today, AMD’s reluctance to move to higher bandwidth DDR2 offerings makes a lot more sense. The plain fact of the matter is that at the current clock speeds at which the Athlon 64 and X2 line are running, most desktop applications see virtually no benefit from higher bandwidth memory. It is possible that server usage models may show a greater performance boost, but it is highly unlikely for a mission critical server to be equipped with anything that isn’t an officially supported standard - especially memory.

While some have been critical of AMD’s unwillingness to embrace DDR2 when Intel did, it would appear that the quest for more bandwidth simply wasn’t in AMD’s best interests. These Athlon 64 and X2 cores that we have here today are far better suited for use with low latency and lower priced DDR400 than anything that offers higher bandwidth.

Down the road, as CPU speeds and the sheer number of cores goes up, then higher bandwidth memories will definitely make much more sense. But for now, for the majority of the population, these new memory dividers won’t do much for you.

The performance improvements themselves aren’t tangible, but if you are trying to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of your system, then these new memory dividers offer you one more avenue to do so. If you have memory that can run at higher than DDR400 speeds without any reduction in latency, then by all means, explore the new dividers; just don’t expect them to change your life.

The one exception to the rule seems to be heavy multitasking scenarios. As we saw from our simple DVDShrink + Doom 3 test, when you run two very memory bandwidth dependent applications on a dual core processor at the same time, the benefits of these faster memory speeds really starts to show itself. We measured a 6.5% increase in performance in the aforementioned test, but next to no performance improvement in other lighter multitasking scenarios. As we continue to develop our multitasking benchmark suites, we will now start looking at how added memory bandwidth, made possible through these new dividers, changes the performance picture.