SDRAM vs. RDRAM, Facts and Fantasy

There are many ways to conduct a benchmark, and there are even more ways to interpret its results. Choosing the wrong benchmark for a certain product can greatly influence the results. Most benchmarks used by manufacturers to demonstrate a specific product's performance are tailored to make efficient use its features; they generally give an estimate how it performs in relation to others, but more importantly they show the maximum performance it's capable of delivering.

And that's exactly the sore spot, because 'capable of delivering' and 'actually delivering' are two entirely different things, not to be confused. Real world apllication is an entirely different story than a controlled benchmark environment. Even the fastest CPU/system can be crippled by either an ill-configured system or running of software not tailored to make use of the CPU or system’s features. Thus, to be able to determine a system’s real world performance simple synthetic benchmarks will not do; the benchmarks must simulate a real world environment to estimate real world performance.

Furthermore, if you know how to benchmark a product, it is very easy to make one come out on top by focussing on the actual performance enhancing features of one, and neglecting those of the other. Just to give an example, Apple’s G4 CPU was boasted to offer 'supercomputer performance on the desktop,' but after close examination of the benchmarks and SIMD optimizations used, it is very clear that it only does so under certain conditions. If another benchmark had been used which did not include the SIMD optimizations the outcome would have been entirely different.

So nothing new here, as the saying goes 'Lies, damn lies and benchmarks.' To do away with some of the obvious pitfalls, we've decided use as balanced a set of benchmarks for this article as possible. We'll use synthetic benchmarks to provide an insight into a system's maximum performance plus two real world benchmarks, one focussed on business and desktop applications, the other on multimedia and games, to measure real-world operation.

The synthetic benchmark is SiSoft Sandra 2000, which measures CPU, FPU, memory and multimedia performance. Bapco's SYSmark 2000 will be used to determine business and desktop application performance; it actually consists of a whole slew of popular applications ranging from 3D modeling to word processing. And finally id Software's Quake III Arena will measure multimedia and game performance, as it is the most demanding 3D game currently available, any misconfiguration or bottleneck and this game will bring performance to a grinding halt.

Skip To Page 1 Introduction 2 Rambus Direct RDRAM 3 Conventional Memory Systems 4 RDRAM Benefits 5 Reducing System Cost 6 RDRAM Pricing 7 RDRAM Pricing Continued 8 RDRAM Performance 9 RDRAM Performance Continued 10 System Performance 11 RDRAM Power Consumption • 12 Benchmark Applications 13 BAPCo SYSmark 2000 14 Benchmark Setup 15 Benchmark Results Intel 440BX 16 Benchmark Results VIA 694X Apollo Pro 133A 17 Benchmark Results Intel i820 18 Benchmark Evaluation 19 Conclusion

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