Obviously we also had to peek at memory bandwidth performance. Now, obviously Intel has an advantage here, triple-channel memory. This explains the tremendous amount of read performance for the Core i7 platform.

If you'd filter that out though, the dual-channel performance DDR3 performance achieved with new Phenoms and it's 1333 MHz DDR3 is nice, but nothing really extreme.

Memory Write test

The same can be said for the memory write tests. Of course Intel dominates here and considering we used 1333 JEDEC timed memory on both platforms. Triple channel performance on Nehalem is just frighteningly good really.

The new AM3 Phenom II processors in both read and write performance seem to benefit from the new DDR3 memory controller, it's really fast, yet the difference between fast DDR2 and DDR3 memory in write performance is neglectable.