Memory performance
We generally start out with some memory subsystem tests, so we can see how the processors match up on that front. These results sometimes help us to understand some of the later benchmark results from real applications.

The changes in the Venice core don't help much in our synthetic memory bandwidth tests. In fact, its bandwidth numbers are slightly lower than the Newcastle-based 3800+. However, look at the Linpack graph for some interesting results. The Venice 3800+ is markedly faster than the Newcastle at matrix sizes between about 64K and 576K, where the L2 cache is the primary determinant of performance. This slight advantage extends well into larger matrix sizes where main memory access is the main bottleneck. Both 3800+ chips' numbers trail off fairly early in Linpack due to their relatively small L2 cache size.