ServerWorks HEsl: DDR bandwidth without DDR SDRAM

Heavy Multitasking

The times to completion obviously increase as we increase the load that these systems are put under however the standings remain relatively similar. The Apollo Pro 133A is still put to shame by the fact that the three higher bandwidth chipsets can complete the same tasks in around 85% of the time.

Once again, the HEsl, 840 and Pro 266 chipsets are all in the same performance ballpark. It seems as if with these three chipsets we are hitting the limits of what two Pentium IIIs can effectively use in terms of memory bandwidth.

While there's a need for more than the 1.06GB/s offered by the 133A when dealing with two CPUs, there doesn't seem to be as dramatic of a difference between the two 2.1GB/s solutions and the sole 3.2GB/s solution. Granted that they are all using different types of memory but their similarities are great enough, especially with the low-latency/high-bandwidth HEsl platform in the mix, that we should be able to make some generalizations based on their behavior.

Throwing even more concurrent tasks at the platforms doesn't change things any more, indicating that our original assumptions were true as the HEsl, 840 and Pro 266 are performing relatively close to one another. While the 133A doesn't have quite enough memory bandwidth, the remaining three platforms have a little more than what is useable by the processors.