Thursday 4 February 2010

Channel Interleave and Rank Interleaving

Been having a look into Channel and Rank Interleaving. Check out the explanations below for further explanations of what they are. (Explanation copied from http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3519&p=5)

Channel Interleave: Higher values divide memory blocks and spread contiguous portions of data across interleaved channels, thereby increasing potential read bandwidth as requests for data can be made to all interleaved channels in an overlapped manner. For benchmarking purposes when using three memory modules, a 4-way interleave may surpass the scoring performance of setting 6-way interleave depending on the benchmark and operating system used (32-bit vs. 64-bit). We did find however that a 6-way interleave was capable of a higher overall BCLK for Super PI 32M than using a 4-way interleave setting (unless of course you run single- or dual-channel and appropriate channel interleaving thus decreasing load upon the memory controller).

Rank Interleave: Interleaves physical ranks of memory so that a rank can be accessed while another is being refreshed. Performance gains again depend on the benchmark in question. For 24/7 systems using triple-channel memory configurations there is no advantage to setting this value below 4 while Channel Interleave should be left at 6 for best overall system performance.

The rest of the memory parameters pretty much default to optimum levels; moving away from these values can in some instances make matters worse in terms of system stability rather than performance. The current BIOS defaults are just about optimal for most overclocking. The highest performance advantage comes from changing the primary memory timings. There's little to no gain in fiddling with any of the secondary timing ranges, other than moving tRFC out to a value of 88 or more if running 12GB (6x2GB) of memory.

So to conclude, Channel and Rank Interleaving settings should be enabled and set to the highest on the board as possible for the greatest memory performance. Nuff said :D

SPD Data

Had a late night here in work last night and tried to get to grips with SPD Data. When I say SPD data, specifically I'm talking about the SPD data for DDR3 DIMM's. What's SPD data you say? It's a table of the timings and settings saved in an EEPROM on the DIMM (Dual Inline Memory Module) module itself. SPD (Serial Presence Detect) is usually a small EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) usually an Atmel 24C02. This is a 2Kb part 8 pin SOIC (Small Order Integrated Circuit) which is enough to store all the settings for your DIMM module.

Using the SPD Tool I mentioned in my last blog entry, you can customise the exact timings on your DIMM, unfortunately though at the moment, it only supports DDR2 and below. The other way to do it is through your BIOS.


Here's a great website which explains each byte in little detail. You can work it out from there. It covers DDR3, DDR2 and the older DDR.


There's also a few interesting publications in there about how DDR3 memory works and an informative one on how to reball and recover DDR2 memory chips. Obviously the tools used in reballing are only used in manufacturing plants, but it's still interesting to see.

Wednesday 3 February 2010

SPD Tool

Found an interesting tool for reading SPD data from your DIMM's on your PC. Was looking for a tool that could do this for a system we're working on, however it doesn't support DDR3 or ICH10 access at the moment, so until then I'll have to find another way to access this information.


SPD TOOL 0.63


If anyone has a tool or knows of a tool for reading or writing SPD data for DDR3 DIMM modules, supporting an ICH10? I'd be very very appreciative!

Created a small RS232 Transceiver yesterday

On a current project we're working on, we had a serial port output which came from the BMC, but there was no RS232 to level shift the TTL levels. In this design, the RS232 transceiver is on the adjoining system which connects to this serial port.

So for testing purposes, to test this serial port we needed to either invest in a special cable with it all built in or make one ourselves from locally available parts. Unfortunately we weren't able to wait for the arrival from Farnell of the USB to TTL cable from FTDI (TTL-RS232-3V3). So I drove down to Maplin and picked me up a small Maxim RS232 transceiver (MAX3232CPE), 5 0.1uF ceramic disc caps and a male and female serial port header. Back in the labs, I snapped off a bit of unused bread-board, soldered in the part, cut the tracks beneath the device to isolate the pins on either side. Attached the 0.1uF caps, wires and I got 3V3 from the front of a capacitor on the actual system itself. Attached the thing up and lo and behold... it didn't work :(

I had the TX and Rx the wrong way around. I was using a crossover cable which swaps the Tx and Rx when going from my device to the Host PC. Once swapped, the yoke works proper. I haven't tested to see how clean the signals are yet, but it should work like a beauty.

The easy part was knowing where to hook up the caps and what to solder to where, it's all freely available on Maxim-IC's website MAX3222-MAX3241 DATASHEET (PDF).
See page 12 for the exact circuit I used. If using a different input voltage to 3V3, then check out table 2.