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Subject: Re: hardware question (SDRAM or DDRAM?)

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 15:35:16 12/04/02

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On December 04, 2002 at 11:09:14, Matt Taylor wrote:

>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

i do not know which databases you use or how big your queries are,
but if i browse in immense databases, then latency is very very important :)

In which case DDR ram is exactly 2 times faster.

O yes, also over 2 times cheaper too :)

>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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