Author: Matt Taylor
Date: 08:09:14 12/04/02
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On December 04, 2002 at 08:00:35, martin fierz wrote: >hi, > >i'm on the lookout for a new PC for endgame database computations. i'll probably >be buying a lot of ram, 2-3GB. i see that there is a big price difference >between DDRAM and SDRAM. IIRC the main difference is that you get a larger >bandwidth, but about the same latency with DDR - so i suppose i'm better off >buying SDRAM for my application. any opinions of the experts? > >thanks in advance > martin If you are working with a database, bandwidth is going to be important. Latency will be nearly irrelevant because you'll always be accessing the ram. Also, you can't buy a fast machine on plain SDRAM. All of the new AMD motherboards and chips use DDR SDRAM. Intel uses DDR SDRAM and RDRAM. This puts low-end (~1.6 GHz) Athlons and P4s around the same price as older chips that use SDRAM. For you, I would think that RDRAM would be most preferable because it has a lot of bandwidth. My DDR-based Athlon is 1.6 GB/sec, but my RDRAM-based P4 is 2.7 GB/sec. Newer P4s theoretically reach higher. That DDR has lower latency becomes meaningless when you're utilizing the maximum capacity of the memory bus and hungry for more as most databases are. Depending on your time frame, there are other elements that you may also wish to consider. JDEC has completed a DDR-II specification, but likely it will not reach the consumer market until next summer. Also, AMD's Clawhammer processor releases sometime next quarter (hopefully earlier). -Matt
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