Daily Reviews Summary 02/11/08

Reviews 52752 Published by Philipp Esselbach 0

The Secrets of PC Memory: Part 4
Bit-Tech published the fourth part of their ongoing feature looking into the technology behind PC memory.

We follow on from the previous part by looking at DDR3 memory and how it's different to DDR2, and where memory technology might need to go in the future.

For better signal quality at higher speed grades, DDR3 adopts a so called "Fly-by" architecture for the commands, addresses and clock signals. This effectively reduced the number of stubs and signalling length from the DDR2 T-Branch architecture to a more elegant and straightforward design.

The Fly-by topology generally connects the DRAM chips on the memory module in a series, and at the end of the linear connection is a grounded termination point that absorbs residual signals, to prevent them from being reflected back along the bus.

We recently asked Aaron Boehm, an Application Engineer at Micron about how important the Fly-by topology is to DDR3. He said that the Fly-by design was "very important in DDR3. Probably one of the biggest advantages of moving to the Fly-by topology is that we are able to achieve a much faster slew rate for the signal. This gives us a bigger data-eye, which is very important in DRAM.
The Secrets of PC Memory: Part 4

Intel Skulltrail Platform
Driver Heaven takes a look at the Intel Skulltrail Platform

Skulltrail. Even the name sounds mean. If you haven't heard the codename before now then we have a treat in store for you today. Skulltrail is a high end desktop PC platform based on Xeon class workstation processors. How does Dual Cpu, 8 Cores, four graphics card slots, dual 1600mhz front side buses with a total of 25.6 GB/s of bandwidth grab you?

Great, now that I have your attention, let me preface the testing. Driver Heaven missed the NDA launch a while ago. Not because we were being lazy, but we decided to spend considerable time with the system and explore some avenues no one else has touched upon yet, such as installing a full set of four modules to get Quad memory bandwidth and testing it with both high end Crossfire and SLI components, we also worked with Intel and received a newer BIOS for testing, but more on that later.

If this isn't enough we then decided to overclock the hell out of it with watercooling to give you guys the best and most thorough review we can. If you are lucky enough to have the money to afford a system like this when it is released then you will definitely want to know how it performs under every situation, both with real world testing and with synthetic benchmarks. Turn the page to find out what Skulltrail is all about.
Intel Skulltrail Platform

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