Memory benchmarks and single-threaded performance
Latency looks better on the discrete memory-controller present in the P35 chipset than on the integrated version on the Phenom's die. That's a little surprising, really, as we'd expect it to fare better,
We've purposely left out the SANDRA memory-bandwidth results. The reasoning lies with how the publicly-available version calculates the final score. AMD reckons that the benchmark simply takes one core into account, leaving the other three untouched. We know that each core can talk to one another and the memory-controller via a crossbar switch, and the current implementation of SANDRA is such that it is, for want of a better word, 'confused' by just how the dual memory-controllers interact with the cores.
Our Phenom 9600 review highlighted a memory-bandwidth figure of around 5.5GB/s. AMD reckons it should be around 11GB/s. To that end, a service pack for SANDRA will be released shortly to correct this calculation.
Chugging through our single-threaded PiFast test that's been around since 2002, we see that the Phenom 9900's straight-line speed is around 20 per cent slower than an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700's. The two processors may be reasonably matched on clockspeeds but Intel has the advantage where just a single core is required to do the majority of the work.
