Why Phenom Bandwidth so Low?

[Frank_Rizzo]

Looking at some of the early reviews the memory bandwidth benchmarks seem to have taken a backwards step.

Any reason for this? Is it a flaw? Will it improve?

This is the only thing putting me off buying Phenom.

 

[Amonlym]

2 things,

latency up due to L3 (will drop as frequency ramps)
benchmarks dont much like the new revised mem controler. http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?p=2567845 for sandra: it only runs 1 thread on mem benchmarks. but running unganged with 4 threads gives more than twice the performance.

(moderators, i cant see any issues with link. feel free to remove if any issues)

 

[Frank_Rizzo]

It could indeed be the case that sandra benchmark is flawed and an update is required.

But I'm hoping these initial benchmarks are on not optimal motherboards. Maybe in a few weeks more mobo's will appear and bios updates well set this thing running better than the initial figures suggest.

There does seem to be some confusion over 'ganging'. This confusion could be the problem.

I can't believe that a more advanced product would have memory utilisation slower than previous products.