Damon, On Monday 14 March 2005 12:36, Damon Register wrote:
Graham Smith wrote:
It is best to use RAM having the same manufacturer and chips or better still only have one stick of double the capacity.
Maybe my knowledge of memory is limited but what about this dual channel memory arrangement? I just bought an Asus A8V board that supports the dual channel memory. A coworker told me that when there are two sticks, the processor can access both at the same time for improved performance.
What about it? What you said is correct, and that's pretty much what it's about. The thing to keep in mind is that CPU speeds have increased much faster than main memory speeds, so the bottleneck this disparity creates has only gotten worse over the years. It's easier to make the data paths wider than it is to make SDRAM faster, so that's what's done. The Pentium 4 external data paths are now 128 bits wide (I think). The DRAM organization using 184-pin DIMMs is 64 bits wide. Dual channel access allows two 64-bit chunks to be retrieved in a single memory cycle.
Damon Register
Randall Schulz