Memory subsystem performance

These most excellent squiggly lines show bandwidth at various stages of the cache and memory hierarchy. Stunningly confusing, innit? The new Phenom IIs perform more or less as expected here, for what it's worth.

Since it's difficult to see the results once we get into main memory, let's take a closer look at the 256MB block size:

We get a bit of a look at DDR3 in action here, as the Phenom X4 810 on the Socket AM3 mobo transfers more data in this test than any other desktop processor save for the Core i7. The bandwidth boost when going from 1066MHz DDR2 to 1333MHz DDR3 isn't huge, but it's real and measurable.

The transition from DDR2 to DDR3 doesn't exact a big penalty in terms of memory access latencies—just a single nanosecond on the X4 810. Notably, the Socket AM3 processors are a couple of nanoseconds quicker at getting to memory than the older Phenom IIs, likely due to the 200MHz higher L3 cache speeds of the Socket AM3 chips.