All Macs In-Depth Tests
Books & Buyer's Guides

New - Ed- Free iPod Touch, - With Computer Purchase

Books
Using iLife ... Books
Using iWork ... Books
Using The iPod ... Books
All Books On Apple Products ...

Information Hubs



Other Product Information


Site Supporters

send this page

Send to a friend

News Feed

Mailing list ...List information...


 
MacSpeedZone Gift Shop



Interleaved Memory - What Is It And How Much Of A Performance Gain Can You Expect

With the advent of the Centris 650 and Quadra 800 many Macintoshes (but not all) have been capable of Memory Interleaving. Memory Interleaving consists of placing pairs of equivalent sized memory chips in the corresponding memory slots of your machines memory banks. The memory controller then sees the two slots as one single logical unit that it can address at once instead of going back and forth. For example you could place a 64MB chip in slot A of memory bank group 1 and a 64MB chip in slot A of memory bank group 2 and you would be able to take advantage of memory interleaving. Chips must be installed in pairs and be of the same size. For a much more detailed explanation of Memory Interleaving click here. You can find out if your machine is capable of memory interleaving by downloading Guru, NewTech's computer RAM specs database software.

The performance gain you will see from memory interleaving depends on the clock speed of the machine, the access speed of your RAM and the application you are using. We performed the tests below on a Daystar Millennium computer fitted with a 604e/200Mhz processor card and 64MB of RAM. One set of test were run with the memory interleaved and the second without.

What is Memory Interleaving?


The results below represent the percentage of extra time taken to perform a given task by the non-interleaved system. Longer bars equals slower performance

A folder of 50MB and 1,000 files was copied for this test

For this test a Word document was scrolled from beginning to end

In this test a common word in a large ClarisWorks document was replaced



Photoshop 4.0 Tests








Photoshop 4.0 Filters








MacBench 5.0 Results

Longer bars equals better performance



Top of page

 

Copyright 1996-2007 by Cider Press Publishing LLC all rights reserved. MacSpeedZone is not authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Computer. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, iPod, iBook, iMac, eMac, and PowerBook are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.

|