AMD Athlon 64 & Athlon 64 FX - It's Judgment Day

Memory Latency & Bandwidth Performance

Given AMD's on-die memory controller, memory latencies should be reduced significantly as well as bandwidth efficiency improved a bit. In order to validate these hypotheses we turn to ScienceMark 2.0 to give us an indication of memory latency and bandwidth performance:

Although the Pentium 4 and the Athlon 64 FX have the same amount of theoretical memory bandwidth, the Athlon 64 FX comes out ahead by a significant margin thanks to the on-die memory controller.

Memory latency is reduced significantly over the Athlon XP thanks to the on-die memory controller, although there is much to be said about Intel's 865/875 memory controllers by looking at the latency comparison seen above.

Here we have the same comparison as before, just with the performance measured in CPU clocks and not ns.