Memory performance

The Opteron 146 opens our synthetic memory tests with a bang, beating the Pentium 4 outright in Sandra's memory bandwidth test—a feat we've not seen since the introduction of the Pentium 4, if I recall correctly. Cachemem's memory read test tilts toward the P4, but the Opteron is a tad faster at writing to memory.

Here's a Linpack result to get excited about (if you are a total geek). The Opteron 146's large L1 cache gives it an advantage with matrix sizes over 512K, and its fast memory controller sustains that advantage as matrix sizes move beyond 1MB.

We can see the impact of the Opteron's integrated memory controller most vividly in our latency test. The Opteron 146 achieves the lowest memory access times we've ever seen.

Folks, we have a new memory performance champion. AMD's decision to bring the memory controller on-die with the Opteron processor pays impressive dividends in our synthetic memory tests. In terms of both memory bandwidth and access latencies, interrelated as they are, the Opteron 146 looks like something special. Now, let's see how that translates into application performance.