As processor microarchitecture capabilities have advanced, one of the greatest performance limitations has become the system architecture’s ability to provide sufficient low-latency memory bandwidth to the processor core. The AMD Athlon™ 64 processor and the AMD Opteron™ processor directly addresses this bottleneck by integrating a DDR memory controller into the processor, revolutionizing the way x86-based processors access main memory. By running at the processor’s core frequency, an integrated memory controller greatly increases bandwidth directly available to the processor at significantly reduced latencies. The performance-enhancing effect is even more dramatic within an AMD Opteron multiprocessing environment, because each additional processor has its own memory controller thereby scaling over all memory bandwidth.

Features of Integrated DDR DRAM Memory Controller:

• Available memory bandwidth scales with the number of processors added
• 128-bit wide integrated DDR DRAM memory controller capable of supporting up to eight (8) registered DDR DIMMs per processor
• Available memory bandwidth up to 5.3GB/s (with PC2700 memory) per processor