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To: Bilow who wrote (76614)	8/3/2001 11:30:34 AM
From: milo_morai	Respond to of 93625

<font color=purple>-Benchmark Shows DDR SDRAM More Bandwidth Efficient Than RDRAM By Van Smith Date: July 20, 2001 A new version of a popular independent benchmark shows that DDR SDRAM may be considerably more efficient when transferring data to the CPU than RDRAM. British company SiSoftware recently enhanced its widely used Sandra utility suite to include processor specific data streaming optimizations in the utility's bandwidth benchmarks. Bandwidth is the rate of flow of data, usually expressed in megabytes per second or gigabytes per second. In a note passed to beta testers, Adrian Silasi, CTO of SiSoftware stated: This minor beta marks one of the most important changes in the benchmarks so far; it is time to replace the ALU/FPU STREAM tests that have been around since the first release way back in 1997 with modern equivalents that take advantage of the EMMX/SSE/SSE2 streaming/prefetching instructions in order to show the real bandwidth of the current platforms. While there have been SSE2 STREAM versions in Sandra for the P4 since Sandra 2001, these were disabled as there was no equivalent for the PIII/Athlon/Duron. With AMD, SGI and other entities/interested people help we have developed a common version that supports all common platforms, i.e. PIII/P4/Athlon/Duron/VIA C3. Briefly (http://www.sgi.com/developers/library/resources/asc_cpu.html), the new tests work by streaming the data into the L1 cache while working on the previous data and posting the results directly to memory without "polluting" the caches. This way the true limit of useable memory bandwidth is approached. The idea is that these benchmarks will be enabled by default on modern CPUs. Of course, the ALU/MMX/FPU tests will remain and will be used on older processors, e.g. PII, old Celeron, K6, Pentium, etc. The user will be able to disable these new tests if it so wishes as before. Read on you will be enlightened! vanshardware.com