Anandtech explore Athlon 64 Rev E DDR-500 support
The latest revision of AMD's Athlon 64 processors have various additions, including SSE3 support, more flexible RAM module support and a host of new memory dividers which can bring (unofficially at least) DDR-500 support without HTT overclocking.
AMD have control over what memory speeds are supported by their Athlon 64 processors, given that the memory controller is on-die. So, with this unofficial DDR-500 capability, Anandtech embark on a quest to see if there's any benefit to be had from running DDR-500 on an Athlon 64.
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Historically, the Athlon 64 hasn’t really been memory bandwidth bound, since the move to Socket-939, which gave it a full 128-bit wide memory bus, and more bandwidth than these CPUs could use.
With the move to dual core however, the effective memory bandwidth that each core gets is significantly reduced, as they both have to share the same 128-bit wide memory interface normally dedicated to a single processor. So in theory, the new dual core X2 line of processors could be a good candidate for these new memory dividers.
The other situation where higher clocked memory is important is with higher clock speed CPUs. The faster that your CPU clock gets, the quicker it can process data and thus, the faster that it needs information and the more memory bandwidth that it needs.
The lower clocked CPUs are less likely to see any real performance difference, with DDR400 being more than sufficient for their needs.
Have a read of the Anandtech article and if you've got a rev. E core and some RAM that can run at DDR-500, perhaps let us know your own experiences?
