Talk:Multi-channel memory architecture

Start

I started the article, as it was requested. I'm not extremely familiar with the intracite architecture, so more detail would be good. DoomBringer 00:44, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Hello. Updated to the best of my ability; added the graphic. Will add a fuller of explanation of Intel vs. AMD later. --Bobcat 20:54, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Good work. The graphic could use some work, maybe to show dual vs single: basically, a wider pipe to memory in the dual channel scenario. I like it though. DoomBringer 03:10, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

No offense, but I think the graphic is misleading. It represents peripherals (AGP, IDE, and USB) to be as fast as the CPU, which is very wrong. In fact, they are even slower than the memory controller. It would be more correct to represent this as an inverted pyramid. I question the applicability of the term "bottleneck", actually, as a bottleneck is a slow point between two fast points. -- Bilbo1507 02:09, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

RAID 0 for memory?

Would it be wrong to think of dual channel memory as an analogous setup to two hard drives configured to RAID 0? You double the speed by splitting the bandwidth costs over two different mediums?

Seems so, although I am not sure. -Yyy 12:13, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Wouldn't dual channel architecture effectively only have any benefit if the two channels are used separately? Meaning that a single application could never profit from more than 1 channel? Or that if two applications intensively use memory that is allocated on one bank, they effectively do not have any profit from dual channel architecture? Dabljuh 19:0wwww

6, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

All applications benefit from dual-channel. Imagine heavy traffic on two highways, one with 64 lanes and one with 128 lanes (Dual-channel), the traffic on the highway with 128 lanes has less problems to go through than on the smaller highway. --Denniss 19:48, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

What's a highway? To use the Raid0 analogy: In RAID0, the data is written to the two disks in parallel, so disk one contains blocks 1,3,5 while disk2 contains 0,2,4 for example. That way, Raid0 can double the throughput because no file above a certain size can be located on one disc alone. Is dual channel working like this, with regard to the fragmentation of data? Dabljuh 08:28, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Highway is analogy is not complete. Because the toll booth (memory controller) would be only 32 lanes so all those 128 lanes of cars would still need to merge only 32 lanes. Imaging the backup. Remember the cpu can only accept 32 bits of data at once. Imagine 64 car lanes going 50mph before the booth, 32 cars lanes going 200mph after the booth and 128 lanes going 50mph before the booth and 32 lanes going 400mph after the booth (dual channel). And yes the data is striped as RAID 0. --NYC 1:06p, 20 Dec 2006 (EST)

As I understand it, the interleaving is done on a much smaller scale. For example, the first 64 bits are stored on one chip, the next 64 bits on the other chip, the third on the first chip, etc. Memory is usually transferred in bigger bursts (are they page-sized bursts?) to the CPU's cache, so one transfer of memory utilizes both chips. This has nothing to do with how many applications are running (or highways :P). So ya, it's kind of like RAID 0 with hard disks, except the stripe size is 64 bits instead of several KB. Hypertransport, on the other hand, allows each CPU to handle 1/n of the memory independently. For this, the memory is divided up into n large chunks. (n = # of CPUs) For this, how memory is allocated to applications does have a big impact. Hypertransport with dual channels (2 channels per CPU) has the potential to be four times faster than a single-CPU system with the single-channel memory architecture. By the way, do not copy this to the article without checking it, because I'm not sure that the details are correct. In fact there's probably at least one mistake. -- Bilbo1507 02:02, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Practical data

Some real life data (benchmarks etc.) would be interesting to see. -- 213.253.102.145 16:57, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Oh we're not supposed to just make stuff up and use the power of positive thinking to make it so?? :P Ya, someone should look into this. -- Bilbo1507 02:28, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

That Intel Whitepaper is Hogwash. Comparing 1X256MB single-channel with 2X256MB single-channel is dumb: of course the system with more memory will perform better because there will be less page faults. The comparison should have been between a 1X512MB system and a 2X256MB system. Maybe Tom's Hardware or Sisoft have benchmark results.

Matching pairs of memory

As per the entry, "Each memory module in each slot should be identical to the one in its matching slot." Why is that? What if they aren't identical? --mriker 03:49, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Internal structure, speed rating and capacity should match, no need to have identical pairs although there are usually less problems with two identical sticks. --Denniss 16:11, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

You should identify that the reason they need to match is because they will be run in sync, and most BIOSes will run them both at the speed of DIMM 0, rather than the fastest compatible speed

None of this article is particularly true on consumer boards any more, where the RAM sold is often fairly terrible in real speed but contains XMP information saying it should run much faster. RAM training at boot determines what speed the mess of memory as a whole will actually run at. I've had the speed go up and CL go down on older memory (i.e. it got faster) after the second bank was populated with faster memory. It was now running at above its rated XMP speed and below its baseline CL. Presumably there was a flaw in the motherboard's termination or voltage control logic somewhere and populating the second bank of quad channel "fixed" it. I think on old boards with memory controllers on the northbridge the 2nd bank could be running at a different speed than the first. Usually ECC RDIMMs are matched because the motherboards they're used in don't contain the ability to upclock them past their base speed; server boards are meant to be stable, not get 2fps more out of something (and their memory bandwidth is already high enough that it isn't the limiting factor, anyway). If full system memory wasn't purchased at the time the server was built it'll usually be replaced with more identical memory because it's what was on the vendor qualified hardware list, not because other memory wouldn't work. --A Shortfall Of Gravitas (talk) 12:21, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Criticism

I think its worthwhile to mention that technologies like XDR and FB-DIMM were created with the idea that the high pincount of DDR was a bad thing and those technologies instead seek to have wide internal busses which serialize data into thin external busses by having more on-chip circuitry. Possibly there should be mention of the 480 pins that dual channel DDR-II requires? Unfortunately my wordcraft skills aren't particularily high today. --222.155.100.80 23:36, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

What's new?

That kingston whitepaper is very overhyped. The idea of using more than one bank of memory has been around for at least a decade. Memory has been too slow for processor for even loger than that. My Indigo2 which was built in 1996 had 4 memory banks (up to 3 SIMMS per bank). My HP J210 also had 4 banks, and would do 16 way interleaving if it had 16 identical SIMMS. Dual Channel as they now seem to call it, is not something that was invented because DDR was too slow. Remember how annoying it was when your Pentium required SIMMs in pairs?

My 486 required 30-pin SIMMs in quads. :) -- Bilbo1507 02:11, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

any CPU with a bus speed that is greater than the memory speed, is innacurate. Even a CPU bus clocked at the same speed as the RAM would end up waiting, because SDRAM takes multiple cycles to read (because of RAS and CAS latency). --Aij 05:59, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

I don't know if there is RAS latency in computer memory. Memory speed is given according to RAS. That is a 10ns memeory has a RAS of 10ns because RAS is the clock strobe. If CPU and RAM ran at the same speed then waiting will only occur on CAS. There'll be no waiting for RAS in this case.

SIMMs in pairs has nothing to do with interleaving. It has to do with data width. For 32 bit CPU, memory, data is accessed 32 bits at a time. But since SIMMs were only 8 bits wide, you always needed to add SIMMs in 4s. 386sx was an exception. It was 32 bit CPU with 16 bit lines. Since it needed 16 bits, SIMMs had to be added in 2s. This was the days of 32 pin SIMMs. SIMMs 72 pins and greater offer atleast 32 bit wide data so today we no longer need to add SIMM in pairs.

Dual Channel could be implemented as interleaved memory but it probably isn't. I've never seen any non-consumer paper on this so I can't say how it works. But one way dual channel could work is akin to 386sx where more data is read at once then can be transmitted (16 bytes is read in 8 ns, and transmited 4 bytes at a time at 2 ns cycles, a bus speed of 500 MHz). Memory is not interleaved in this case. Interleaving was useful in days of DRAM, which required refreshing. It was interleaved because one bank would be accessed while the other refreshed. SDRAM does not need refreshing and this kind of interleaving would offer no gain for SDRAM.

Note only sequential access is speed up by interleaving or dual channel. Random access gains little or no improvement. -NYC Dec 20, 2006 EST

Actually, Pentiums did need 72-pin SIMMs in pairs to match their bus, and RAM in the same class as PC-100 provided a 64-bit bus (which would have required 4 matching 72-pin SIMMs if they hadn't changed things around again). This is what 8Mx64 means on a 64MB PC-100 DIMM. (And wasn't it 30 pins not 32 pins on the older SIMMs?) It does have something to do with interleaving, because on a 32-bit bus, bits 0-7 are stored on the first chip, 8-15 on the next chip, 16-23 on the next, and 24-31 on the next, and 32-39 are back on the first. So the memory is interleaved across 4 chips, with a tiny stripe size. I think this may be how a dual-channel memory controller works too. Regardless, both the old and new way (if they're different) see the same speed increase because each bus cycle transfers more data. I think what we'll see is another eventual consolidation of two chips into one if dual-channel out-paces cranking up the clock rate. So no, I don't think this is anything new, but just because it's an old trick doesn't mean it's ineffective. I wish I could match 8 or 16 chips to get 8x or 16x the bus speed, like Alphas mostly did. -- Bilbo1507 02:24, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Now we're back to MCM mega-chips like TR Pro with 4 memory controllers with 2 DDR4 channels each or Epyc 9004 with 4x3 DDR5 channels which achieve the highest memory bandwidth (but take an intra chip latency hit) by interleaving memory across all 4 controllers. Or they can be run in 2/3x4 interleave or 4x2/3 interleave depending on how latency-sensitive the application is. Mr. Bilbo predicted something here since they're now accessing DDR5 as though it were 2x32-bit wide data lines instead of a single 64 bit wide. Not really true dual channel since they made it narrower at the same time, but it's there... then of course you have the 12 channel thing on Epyc 9004 and the newest Xeons, interleaving across a ton of modules for system memory bandwidths higher than all but the priciest consumer GPUs... performance desktops were moving in the right direction and made it up to quad channel memory before taking a nose-dive post-Broadwell-E. A Shortfall Of Gravitas (talk) 12:31, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Question

Do dual channel motherboards accept memory which doesn't support dual channel? i.e. is it backward compatible? Would be handy to know...

There is no memory supporting only single-channel or only dual-channel. All memory sticks may work in dual-channel if you have a pair of two. Best is is identical modules or at least two similar ones (speed grade, memory density). --Denniss 09:55, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the response, I now understand the concept of dual-channel operation. However it should be added to the main article for other people's benefit.

Some retail boxed ram, especialy ones from Kingston, sometimes have a "Not Dual-Channel Compatible" warning label on them. I remember occasionally seeing this when I worked for <popular electronics store>. Keep in mind that these usually still work but, as mentioned in this Wiki article, some motherboards may have issues with them. My P4 board with an SIS chipset had no problem dual channel-ing them.66.177.213.82 21:32, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

I came here for clock speed information and couldn't find it

So, perhaps it should be added by someone who knows the answer. I'd like to know if RAM, in a dual-channel configuration, continues to run at the same clock speed or not. For example, PC-3200 RAM runs at 200 MHz. Would it continue to run at 200 MHz in a dual-channel configuration? It seems like I've read before that the speed drops in half (100 MHz in this example). Modul8r 22:50, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Why should the speed be cut in half ? In Dual-channel both PC-3200 sticks are still operating at 200 MHz as long as they are compatible to each other and the memory controller likes them, too. --Denniss 11:38, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Your memory would only down-clock if you mixed it with a slower chip. For example, if you put in a PC-2100 chip in there, all your ram would run at 133 MHz.66.177.213.82 21:34, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

MB or MiB?

This article is littered with misabbreviations. I once corrected them, however they were reverted, and the guilty party insisted that "GiB" was the correct abbreviation for gigabytes. Was there some inverse revolution where letters were ADDED to abbreviations, or does this other user not know what he's talking about? Seedsoflight 20:16, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

See Binary prefix --Denniss 13:47, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Yup, the boy don't know what's the difference between MB's and GB's 203.81.161.154 15:36, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Dual Channel with one stick

If you only use one stick of DDR2, is the speed effectively halved because it can't use dual channel? 91.84.211.193 10:24, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

The maximum memory transfer rate is halved. Usually system performance does not decrease at the same rate but it depends on the board/CPU how much it decreases (a P4 is severely affected but a Core/Athlon64 not that hard). --Denniss —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 15:22, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Inadequate information and sourcing

The sole source for this article is currently a whitepaper from two technology companies that stand to benefit from promoting new memory technology. The whitepaper provides an elementary explanation of how dual-channel architecture works, but fails to discuss the question of what kinds of application environments succeed or fail to take advantage of this feature. The wide disparity of benchmark results (as little as about 3% improvement to as much as about 80% improvement, based on the approximate but not clearly stated raw numbers of directly comparable components, and ignoring the sometimes misleading use of chart numbering) makes clear that the identification of these specific environments is vital to understanding whether dual-channel is of any use to a consumer for their particular needs. (That's why I came to this article in the first place.) Can't we find some more objective and more thorough sources for this 4-year-old technology? ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:45, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Modules should be in non-matching banks

In order to achieve this, two or more DDR/DDR2 SDRAM memory modules must be installed into matching banks

I don't know if this is universal or not, but the sentence above is misleading. Colored banks can (always?) belong to the same channel -- to get dual-channel working correctly, paired modules should be installed to opposite banks, not matching banks. Thus, in a 3-bank configuration where 2 banks are blue and one is black, dual channel setup would require 1 module in a blue slot and 1 module in the black. Ham Pastrami 06:11, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

• • At least in my gigabyte mobo, it is recommed to set in the SAME colored slots. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.108.215.226 (talk) 15:38, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Misuse of "bank"

If the motherboard has two pairs of differently coloured DIMM sockets (the colours indicate which bank they belong to, bank 0 or bank 1), then one can place a matched pair of memory modules in bank 0, but a different-capacity pair of modules in bank 1, as long as they are of the same speed. Using this scheme, a pair of 1 GiB memory modules in bank 0 and a pair of matched 512 MiB modules in bank 1 would be acceptable for dual-channel operation.[1]

This is highly misleading. First of all, the word "bank" is being used ambiguously to mean a pair of corresponding DIMMs from each channel, which is not technically correct since the term "bank" refers to a single side of a module (paired up for DIMMs). The whitepaper itself refers to these as "DIMM 0" and "DIMM 1" of each channel (A and B). In practice, these would normally be labeled as bank 0/1, 2/3, 4/5, and 6/7 or simply as DIMM-0 through DIMM-3. The rest of the paragraph is also needlessly ambiguous -- what it's trying to say is that you can mix modules of different size in a channel, as long as the configuration is mirrored in the other channel. Which is somewhat redundant with stating the need for matching pairs of DIMMs. I'll try to clean it up later if no one gets around to it. Ham Pastrami 18:15, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Further ambiguity of the term "bank"

I'm confused about how the word "bank" is used and it is particularly confusing since the SDRAM chips on the DIMMs themselves each contain 8 banks of DRAM, addressed by the BA[2:0] ("bank address") pins. My understanding: each memory location is uniquely addressed by (i) channel number, (ii) rank number, (iii) bank address, (iv) row-address and (v) column-address:

• "Channel 0" refers to all memory connected to controller data bits 63:0.
• "Channel 1" refers to all memory connected to controller data bits 127:64.
• "Rank 0" refers to all memory connected to controller chip select CS0_N.
• "Rank 1" refers to all memory connected to controller chip select CS1_N.
• "Bank 7" refers to memory addressed when BA[2:0]=111.

The SDRAMs' address and control pins are shared between channel 0 and channel 1. A diagram would help here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.254.223.97 (talk) 16:45, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Actual results

I've removed this line from actual results:

But still there where numerous reports of users who've felt a performance boost from dual-channel. Some users reported a boost circa 70% in comparison to single-channel.

Aside from the terrible grammar and misspelled words, I felt that the lack of evidence and weasel words necessitated the removal until someone can write it up better and provide actual evidence Kakomu (talk) 17:45, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Difference between Interleaving, Dual Channel

Can anyone explain the difference between these 2? They all increase memory bandwidth. I understand that interleaving helps accessing contiguous memory locations due to locality by overlapping CAS. Dual channel seems to imply no interleaving, but parallel access to both memory modules. This would explain why it generally doesn't improve performance. It wouldn't speed up contiguous accesses up to the virtual memory page size. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.61.49.181 (talk) 10:15, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Memory interleaving is a technical term that means the memory controller stores one block of data in the first module, then the next block in the next module, and so on, until it gets back to the first module. It only makes sense to do if you can access multiple modules in parallel, which usually implies multiple memory buses, although older asynchronous DRAM systems could take advantage of limited interleaving on the same bus by sending commands to the next module before reading results back from the previous one. Dual-channel OTOH is a marketing buzzword which means the system can read from two modules faster than from a single one. Note the use of the word "channel" rather than an actual meaningful word. For example, dual-channel would describe a 2-way interleaved system as well as an early dual CPU Opteron which had two completely separate memory buses. Aij (talk) 00:04, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

CPUs have one set of data lines to each channel if you check the pinouts. The only reason to have this configuration at all, since it eats up die space, is to take advantage of multiple sticks of memory to increase speed, and the easiest way to do that is hardware level striping across them. In the case of multi-chip processors with memory controllers built in which are fairly new (the Q6600 was an MCM but still had a Northbridge) there is usually a memory controller per-CCD and various striping configurations are possible, although going from 8-way striping on a TR Pro for example to 4x2-way striping doesn't affect overall memory bandwidth as negatively as dropping from 8 to 2 banks does in real world comparisons vs. Ryzens since each CCD is able to fetch from its local memory simultaneously, and the whole mess is really dependent on workload, NUMA-awareness of programs if more than one NUMA node per processor is being used, etc. Additional banks OTOH usually just add to the capacity and on most systems past dual bank 4-channel broadwell force a drop in overall memory speed to the next lower JEDEC level if the second bank is populated (which might not actually affect bandwidth, since CL usually becomes faster along with clock becoming slower and the two are heavily related). A Shortfall Of Gravitas (talk) 12:41, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Should MOSNUM continue to deprecate IEC prefixes?

A discussion has been started at WP:MOSNUM concerning the continued deprecation of IEC prefixes. Please comment at the MOSNUM talk page. Thunderbird2 (talk) 19:13, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Quad channel?

Now that everyone is installing 4 slots of memories, is there any quad channel mobo out? Lightblade (talk) 04:16, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

about the measures in performance gain with dual channel

i can't believe you people take tom's hardware's garbage as a source for performance examples. I put it simple, I run everest 5.5 in DDR2-1066 single channel and I get 5970MB/sec read, I put it in dual channel (G.skill 2x2GB PI Edition) and I get 7870MB there's a difference please take a look somewhere serious like xbitlabs or do your own measures with your own computers. hope it changes before i change the article removing tom's hardware's garbage from a serious website like Wikipedia —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.31.175.252 (talk) 11:52, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

You're measuring the transfer rate using a benchmarking tool designed specifically to maximize transfer rate, i.e. the same assumption that manufacturers use in order to inflate the appearance of performance gain. A real-world application (i.e. software that is not a benchmarking tool) generally cannot be optimized in such a way because they are more constrained by the CPU, I/O, or any number of other bottlenecks. You miss the entire point of the Tom's article, which was to verify real-world performance benefits against the advertising claims and theory, which although true, are meaningless. In other words, your gain of ~50% memory bandwidth results in a gain of only +5% frames per second when running an actual game. That is the point of the Tom's article. Nobody disputed the benchmark scores themselves. Ham Pastrami (talk) 05:59, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Merger proposal

I propose that Triple-channel architecture be merged into Dual-channel architecture and that the article be renamed "Multi-channel architecture" or similar. It seems that having seperate articles is redundant, as the two concepts are very similar. 98.103.186.3 (talk) 18:15, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Agree. Please just do this, as it is highly logical so needs no mass discussion. Use "Multi-channel architecture" and do sections for "Dual-channel architecture", "Triple-channel architecture", and "Quad-channel architecture". But PLEASE make sure you sort all the current link-to's to link to the new appropriate section on the new page, eg. "Multi-channel architecture#Dual-channel architecture". --Jimthing (talk) 17:33, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Agree. The technology behind this is similar, and most of the content will overlap in each article. GL1zdA (talk) 15:06, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Okay. Since there haven't been any No's so far and since this seems like a good thing to do, I am going to go ahead and do it. Arjun G. Menon (talk · mail) 07:01, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Article needs to be improved

The article is need of improvement. Any experts on the subject are welcome to add info to this article. For others, the German Wikipedia article on Dual Channel memory could be used for reference for improving this article. Arjun G. Menon (talk · mail) 08:06, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

X79 and quad-channel?

What happened with quad-channel memory? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.187.151.86 (talk) 10:59, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Bottleneck What the Hell

What is the Bottleneck diagram supposed to tell me? That my USB port is faster than my memory? That peripheral data has to go through memory before it goes to a CPU? I don't think it's the right way of visualizing the Bottleneck principle. It does not visualize how fast memory is in comparison to mos peripherals. Please help me out but isn't the bottleneck in numbercrunching usally CPU->RAM->CPU. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.205.102.196 (talk) 10:54, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Commented out so not visible.  Done It would be useful to have an updated version with the salient bottleneck issue. A possible separate pair of images showing single channel/dual channel would also help. Widefox; talk 14:14, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

ganged versus unganged

This section mentions that unganged multi-channel memory could be used to speed up multi-threading, but since a multi-threading program shares a common virtual address space, how would a multi-threading application allocate memory so that the physical pages of memory ended up on separate unganged busses of memory? For a multi-processing application (separate virtual address space for each process), it could be possible for the operating system to allocate paged memory from separate busses for 2 to 4 processes (for double to quad channel memory), but I don't know if there are any operating systems that do this. Rcgldr (talk) 03:03, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

In unganged mode, a core is assigned to use only one of the memory buses. A thread will only run on one core, so it doesn't have to worry about multiple buses. 65.87.26.124 (talk) 01:08, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

It could be envisioned in the same way RAID 0 works, when compared to JBOD. With RAID 0 (ganged mode), it's up to the additional logic layer to provide better (ideally even) usage of all available hardware units (HDDs, memory banks); with JBOD (unganged mode) it's relied on the statictical usage patterns to ensure even usage of all available hardware units. I'll try to find a reference, and add this into the article. — Dsimic (talk) 01:20, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Quad-Channel Haswell-E

I have edited the list of quad-channel supporting CPUs to include more 2nd and 3rd gen. chips and 4th gen. Haswell chips. I pulled everything from ARK and went through checking for supporting families. Everything should be updated until the E7 series is launched this fall. The AMD list could use updating too. --Jsd45 (talk) 23:47, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

Dual Channel History

I think there should be something in the article about the first dual channel chipsets. If I remember correctly, the first Dual Channel chipset was the Intel 850 (11/2000) and the first DDR-SDRAM Dual Channel chipset was the nVidia nForce (06/2001). --MrBurns (talk) 14:09, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello! That sounds like a good suggestion; any chances, please, for providing a few references for that? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 19:08, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

Found some benchmarks

Please validate these information. I have not the technical knowledge to do it myself. http://www.mersenneforum.org/showthread.php?t=20575

93.88.103.166 (talk) 18:30, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Multi-Channel Requirements

The requirements "data" given in the article do NOT match what Intel says: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005657/boards-and-kits.html#dual So who is right-- the author or Intel? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.241.152.175 (talk) 18:49, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

The requirements info in this article are completely full of it, or the computer I'm posting from can't exist, since it's an i7-6950x (they're cheap right now) with 4x8GB DDR4 in quad channel mode in one bank and 4x32GB modules in the other bank that are working fine as 160GB of quad channel total. I've also mixed and matched sizes within 3 channels on both a Nehalem i7 and an old junk xeon of some sort, I'm ashamed to admit. The first case works because when 8 slots exist the processor divides them into 2 physical banks which can be selected via DDR{0/1/2/3}_BA[0:1] pins and logical bank groups per socket addressed via a similar method. The second case works because Intel flat out says they support it and you don't need to dig anything else up, and they've always supported it. The whole "use the exact same matching set of memory everywhere" has to do primarily with the usual BS spread by overclockers and the barrage of idiots who decided to start a "tech blog" for quick ad revenue and free parts but don't bother to do any research or actually try anything weird out... you know, the things that would actually interest people instead of 20 pages of artificial benchmarks. My mismatched size memory is also mismatched in timings and base JEDEC speed, and the timings improved when more was installed via regular old POST mem training. It somehow settled on some weird hybrid that's faster than either type of stick and not directly supported by either. Even more weirdly it solved sporadic system crashes I'd been having, although this may have been something that had settled into an empty slot and was just barely shorting a couple of pins. Who knows. Anyway this is wikipedia so the arbitrary crap I did to my computers over the years is "original research", but I'm just making the point that this article is extremely oversimplified at best and more like what I'd call completely incorrect in almost every aspect. In reality, you can't have memory pairs in channels 0/1 or in 2/3 that won't run at the same voltages because they share the setting. That's it. Most UEFI doesn't expose it but at least the 2011v3 chips (even non server) support lockstep modes for memory with various pairing / mirroring / interleave methods. It's a complicated topic. I'm afraid I can't condense anything down enough to help aside from the reference link and the others like it you can google from intel and AMD.

My vote would be to delete the whole section, the requirements there are barely exist and are too complicated to really cover here. --A Shortfall Of Gravitas (talk) 09:18, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

References

Interleaving granularity?

Hi, this seems not given AFAICS. Is it per 64 bits (width of a DRAM bus), or a cache line perhaps (typically 512 bits), or per 4K page, or something else? TIA 79.66.198.78 (talk) 18:48, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Edit-I doubt it would make sense to be 4K-page sized because the very common case of linear reads would gain next to nothing, so I guess the smaller the better? 92.6.102.193 (talk) 10:25, 15 October 2021 (UTC)

I'd really appreciate some info on this, please! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.103.30.137 (talk) 13:21, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Most of the time a computer will be reading far more than 4k of data from RAM into cache at once, there's prefetch involved for most reads. On Threadripper PRO and Epyc the interleaving can be controlled in UEFI settings:

... This determines the starting address of the interleave (bit 8, 9, 10 or 11). The options are 256 Bytes, 512 Bytes, 1 KB, 2 KB and Auto.

A Shortfall Of Gravitas (talk) 12:47, 20 June 2023 (UTC)