DDR SDRAM faster than Rambus

VIA has made the first mainboard prototypes available for tests with the new Apollo Pro266, which is the first PC chipset to support DDR-SDRAM. Since the Apollo Pro 266 only supports Intel CPUs, the Apollo KT266 will soon follow, which will then support the AMD Athlon and Duron.

The double data rate memory modules (DDR-SDRAM -DIMMs) are available as PC200 and PC266. The PC200 modules achieve a data transmission of 1.6 GByte/s at a clock frequency of 100MHz. In comparison, the normal PC100 SDRAM components only achieve 800 MByte/s and the PC133 modules at least achieve 1.066 GByte/s. The PC266 modules even achieve a transfer rate of 2.1 GByte/s. In the first tests, the prototype mainboard from VIA with the Apollo Pro266 was able to clearly outperform the other Socket 370 mainboards with PC133 SDRAM and DRDRAM.

TecChannel was able to achieve an advantage of between 7.4 and 12.2 percent for the DDR SDRAM compared to PC1 in the SYSmark98 application benchmark as the most important indicator for 2D performance 33 Determine SDRAM. Compared to the RAM bus, the DDR-SDRAM is 1 to 3.5 percent faster. But the DDR-SDRAM is also faster than its competitors in 3D benchmarks such as 3Dmark99 Max, Unreal and Quake 3 Arena. Only in the case of Unreal did the DDR SDRAM have to join the RAM busjust give up. In software rendering, however, it looked the opposite again. The Apollo Pro266 chipset can handle AGP 4x and, in addition to DDR-SDRAM, can also handle normal SDRAM with 66, 100 or 133 MHz. In contrast to the KT266 for AMD processors, the Apollo Pro266 is SMP-capable, i.e. it supports up to 2 Pentium III processors. The pre-series chipset was already running very stable and fast, but one can still expect a little more performance from the series boards, which are due to come onto the market this year.