Memory tests
Memory tests
According the results from ScienceMark 2.0, memory bandwidth is lower on the quartet of Core 2 Duos than on a Pentium Extreme Edition 965 (Presler core) and AMD's AM2 CPUs. The new Intel CPUs connect to the discrete MCH in the same manner as all previous LGA775 CPUs, so it's no surprise to see a sub-6GiB/s figure. Remember, they're being fed through an interconnect that operates at 8.5GiB/s.
Here's the first vindication of Intel's Smart Memory Access and Advanced Smart Cache technologies. Intel's engineers' remit was to reduce system memory access latency such that performance would be comparable to an on-die controller's. Deep buffering, high on-chip cache levels, and highly intelligent prefetching, which form part of the out-of-order superscalar Core 2 Duo micro-architecture, help reduce access time to sub-AMD Athlon 64 levels. Look at how comparatively slow the Pentium 4 architecture is in this regard.
