Um dude, P4s desperatly feed on low latency. If there is anything RDRAM is holding back, it's latency. An MCH, modular, would save the day, it'd have most likely an even more significant performance boost than the Hammer's integration, because P4s require low latency to keep their high clock speeds well used.
Sorry Eden, but I've got to disagree with you. Yes, RDRAM has a high latency. But the P4 doesn't much suffer for it.
One thing that Intel has done well though is their prefetching. Because of this, the prefetch is able to negate an awful lot of the memory's latency. So the only thing that low-latency memory would actually improve are the times when the P4's predictions are wrong and thus the prefetch misses. And even then, with the large cache sizes of the Northwoods and beyond, this is getting more and more negated.
This is one area where AMD could <b>really</b> learn to improve their cores. Instead though, because AMD does mispredict a lot more than Intel and because AMD has less cache, the Athlons practically live or die by the memory latency.
P4's however suffer far less from slow memory. Which is why bandwidth is usually much more important for a P4 than latency is, hence RDRAM from the evil Rambus. (And hence no RDRAM for the Athlon, because an AMD + RDRAM system would be as mismatched as putting SDR SDRAM on a P4.)
<A HREF="http://forumz.tomshardware.com/community/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=45775#45775" target="_new"><font color=red>Join</font color=red> <font color=blue>the</font color=blue> <font color=green>THGC</font color=green> <font color=orange>LAN</font color=orange> <font color=purple>Party</font color=purple>!</A>