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Subject: Re: SDRAM vs RDRAM memory performance

Author: Tom Kerrigan

Date: 08:17:31 02/24/00

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On February 24, 2000 at 09:02:43, Barry Culp wrote:

>If you allocate a large amount of hash tables ...say 128 mb or more ...does that
>make RDRAM more efficient than SDRAM ??

No, because hash table entries are usually very small (~16 bytes).

RDRAM can transfer data at extremely high speeds, but that doesn't really matter
when you're only talking about a few bytes, because the difference can only be a
few nanoseconds.

What really matters is the "latency," that is, the amount of time it takes to
start reading from a random place in memory. RDRAM has a higher latency than
SDRAM.

Basically, the only programs that benefit from RDRAM are programs that go
through a ton of memory sequentially. For example, if you apply a filter to some
huge file in Photoshop, RDRAM will be several percent faster than SDRAM. Natural
voice recognition is supposed to be a "technology" that benefits from RDRAM,
too, but for some reason all the benchmarks still come out in SDRAM's favor.

-Tom



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