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To: jcholewa who wrote (58937)	10/26/2000 4:52:14 PM
From: jim kelley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Re:BTW, a techish question for those applicable: HWP (hardware prefetching) appears to help latency, possibly drastically, at the expense of bandwidth. It is my speculation that the i840's supposed "prefetch cache" was a large factor in the specfp boost over i820, since the prefetch could utilize parts of the extra 1.6GB/s bandwidth to decrease the effective latency in the memory subsystem. Continuing on this speculation, I think I'm asserting that HWP would be a little bit more of a benefit on systems with DRDRAM than on systems with SDRAM, as the former is said to have a higher latency and, in the case of the i850, a higher peak bandwidth. What you are saying makes sense. Essentially, you are trading excess bandwidth for a reduction in memory latency. RDRAM handles concurrent requests better than SDRAM and overall through put should increase. It seems that the 820 would have benefited from the use of hardware prefetch. I have heard that Intel hobbled the 820's performance elsewhere. I do not know if that is true but if so it seems have been a mistake. JK