Intel Quad-Core Memory Performance

With Tyan's Tempest i5000XT offering a total of four memory channels using the Intel 5000X Chipset, for this article we had decided to see the impact on multiple memory channels when running two Clovertown processors. The memory we had used to conduct these tests was Kingston's KVR533D2S8F4/512. Each of these modules offers a 512MB memory capacity and operates at DDR2-533 speeds with 4-4-4-10 timings and 1.8V. The AMB chip used by this memory is Intel's QG6400 and the ICs used are from Qimonda/Infineon with a part number of HYB18T512800AF-3.7. The processors in use are two Intel Xeon E5320 CPUs.

For the article we had ran our benchmarks with the memory in a single, dual, and quad FB-DIMM memory channel configurations. Below are the memory population rules for the Tyan Tempest i5000XT motherboard.

The benchmarks we had run to see the performance effects of the varying number of memory channels with the dual Clovertown processors were Enemy Territory, Quake 4, RAMspeed, and kernel compilation. The synthetic RAMspeed benchmarks were used to measure the integer memory performance in copy, scale, and add modes. Enemy Territory, Quake 4, and kernel compilation tests were used to represent the impact on real-world performance. The kernel compilation tests used the Linux 2.6.19 kernel and a default configuration with the make -j argument being set to nine. On the following pages are our results.