Nehalem only supports DDR3 800 or 1066

[George]

After reading this article I thought I would develop a bit of a counter point. Although its a shame to see Nehalem potentially being held back like this its worth considering a few extra factors before considering this a complete loss.

DDR3 has architectural improvements over DDR2 which means even at the same frequency it should offer similar if not better performance (even given its higher latencies). As DDR3 matures the latencies at 1066 should drop without the need for any increased voltage so there will still be headroom for a bit better performance has the platform ages.

Also, memory bandwidth is a function of both frequency and channels. The memory controller on the high end Nehalems is triple channel so theoretically it should be to give a 50% improvement in bandwidth over Core 2 Duo (Yeah right... not going to happen... but it should be faster).

Finally the onboard memory controller and removal of the FSB should unlock a bit more bandwidth, as it did with AMD's Athlon/Opteron series.

Overall we are going to be looking at memory performance that should be strictly faster than DDR2 at 800mhz, and probably a bit higher than the "unofficial" DDR2 1066mhz, used on the Core 2 Duo platform. The bandwidth will also likely be greater than the AMD Phenom/Athlon processors at least until they adopt DDR3 sometime in 2009.

Although DDR3 1066 sounds slow, when you take into consideration everything it should be more than sufficient. The only people that are going to suffer are the kind of people that like to mount neon lights onto everything in the case and brag about how high their numbers are.

Thoughts?

[fwoot]

lol i do like my bling pc 

[George]

If my PSU wasn't overloaded I would probably spring for some neons. As it is I've hot wired an old PSU to power my gfx card separately... waiting for the moolah to get a more stable setup lol

[Eliot]

DDR3 has architectural improvements over DDR2 which means even at the same frequency it should offer similar if not better performance (even given its higher latencies). As DDR3 matures the latencies at 1066 should drop without the need for any increased voltage so there will still be headroom for a bit better performance has the platform ages.

Also, memory bandwidth is a function of both frequency and channels. The memory controller on the high end Nehalems is triple channel so theoretically it should be to give a 50% improvement in bandwidth over Core 2 Duo (Yeah right... not going to happen... but it should be faster).

Thoughts?

Same performance in most cases, if memory can be read linear it is faster, if it has to jump around, it's actually slower.

It's more bandwidth, but due to the fact, the third channel can't be interleaved, it does not really matter if two or three channels.

With prices skyhigh for DDR3, it's quite frankly a expensive choice without substantial benefit.

But as we know, Intel and M$ are doing much to get the industry some money, but in case of M$ it does now backfire (Vista Capable Class Action)... so both try to maximize profits, but we have the choice not to let them

As stated in my article, if you don't need the power, there is no reason to switch your system...

best,

Eliot