Memory Bandwidth Performance
Surprisingly MaxxMem² reports very little difference in memory bandwidth between the Core i7 920 and the new Core i7 860 processor. Despite utilizing a triple-channel memory controller, the Core i7 920 produced the same write performance, while the read throughput was 5% higher. The Core i7 920 has a 140MHz clock speed disadvantage nonetheless.
The Core i5 750 processor, which does operate at the same frequency as the Core i7 920, only uses a dual-channel memory controller and does without Hyper-Threading. This reduced the write performance by 8.5% when compared to the 920, while read performance was 12% lower.
Although the AMD Phenom II X4 965 processor also features a dual-channel memory controller with a rather high operating frequency of 3.40GHz, it delivered by far the lowest memory bandwidth result. The read performance of the Phenom II X4 965 was 26.5% lower than that of the Core i5 750, making it considerably slower in this test when compared to the Intel competition.
The latency results follow the same trend as the bandwidth results, though as you can see the difference between the Phenom II X4 965 and Core i5 750 processors is much smaller here. The Core i7 920 is also only slightly better than the Core i7 860 in this test.
EVEREST Ultimate Edition shows slightly different performance margins when compared to MaxxMem². For instance, the Core i7 920 has a considerably higher read and write performance advantage over the Core i7 860 processor, but the margin separating the Core i7 860 and Core i5 750 is significantly smaller in this test. One thing did remain constant, and that was the huge margin by which the Phenom II X4 965 trails the Intel processors.