ATHLON vs XEON: number crunching

[Mikhail Kuzminsky]

According to Richard Walsh
> From beowulf-admin at beowulf.org Thu Jun 20 23:42:38 2002
> From: Richard Walsh <rbw at ahpcrc.org>
> To: beowulf at beowulf.org, lindahl at keyresearch.com
> Subject: Re: ATHLON vs XEON: number crunching
> 
> "Under heavy load conditions, the latency of SDRAM deteriorates
>  rapidly. RDRAM holds up quite gracefully ... under heavy load,
>  where memory performance is crucial to CPU performance, RDRAM
>  has far lower latency than SDRAM."
> 
> Also, I note that both the McKinley/ZX1 from HP, EV7, and Cray SV2 will 
> use RDRAM. Would you argue that this is for bandwidth reasons only?
> 
> Perhaps this is a total versus component latency difference?
   The choice of RDRAM may be was done simple because this decision
was done a lot of time ago (i.e. the time of development is 
too high), when DDR was not available as good alternative to RDRAM.

Mikhail Kuzminsky
Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry 
Moscow