Crucial memory
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007My long held belief that cheap memory costs more in a long run was confirmed in the last few days when 3 out of 4 chips in two OCZ 4 GB (2x2GB) PC2-5400 Vista Upgrade edition kits failed miserably in a new Intel Q6600 based system – one memory chip would have errors in memtest and with 2 others the system won’t post at all. New delivery of chips from Crucial sorted it all perfectly – 50% more expensive, but can you really afford bad memory that will lead to very weird crashes that would imply other hardware components are at fault?
While on the subject of memory – testing it with memtest also provides nice benchmark showing bandwidth available to processor in case of L1 and L2 caches and actual RAM: the stats for Q6600 (2.4 Ghz) system running with dual channel memory 4×2 GB at 667 Mhz (CL5) shows that actual speed of ram is just below 4 GB/sec – to put this into perspective it suggests that reading all RAM in that server would take whole 2 seconds! This is of course much faster than reading same 4 GB from hard disk, but still – RAM is anything but very fast insofar as processor speeds are concerned: L1 cache for example is rated as almost 400 GB/sec by the very same memtest, this is almost 100 times faster than accessing data from RAM! L2 cache is slower, but still almost 170 GB/sec.
What this means is that those who wish to obtain very high performance from their code should think carefully about algorithms used so that they are cache friendly – otherwise software might run slow because it is bottlenecked by comparatively slow RAM accesses.