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Subject: Re: Latency versus Information Bandwidth: Questions

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 09:01:19 12/06/02

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On December 05, 2002 at 08:24:08, Jeremiah Penery wrote:

>On December 05, 2002 at 06:31:27, Matt Taylor wrote:
>
>>On December 04, 2002 at 21:58:27, Jeremiah Penery wrote:
>>
>>>Current AthlonMP chipsets also have a seperate bus per CPU.  They use the same
>>>EV6 bus as Alpha processors did (or still do?).  The memory modules shared,
>>>whereas Hammer will have separate memory modules for each processor.
>>
>>Yes and no. Each CPU has a dedicated bus to the memory controller (and to any
>>other CPU??). However, there is only one memory bus (bus that physically
>>connects to the memory chips), and that bus is shared by all processors. Intel
>
>Yep.
>
>>has the same limitation, but Intel uses other tricks to further double the
>>memory bandwidth (and effectively make memory access no more costly on SMP than
>>on single-CPU). Unfortunately, AMD has not. (The AMD 760 and 760 MPX are the
>>only Socket A SMP chipsets available, and neither has this capability.)
>
>Intel SMP machines have only one bus to the memory controller, that is shared by
>all processors.  That is the difference I was trying to point out, but couldn't
>quite say properly last night. :)


True.  Fortunately they are using 2-way interleaving (for duals) or 4-way
interleaving
(for quads) to double or quadruple the memory bandwidth and prevent bad
starvation
problems.  Not all duals do interleaving however, and those that don't show a
marked
degradation in performance when running a memory-intensive application...




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