The performance improvements themselves aren't tangible, but if you are trying to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of your system, then these new memory dividers offer you one more avenue to do so. If you have memory that can run at higher than DDR400 speeds without any reduction in latency, then by all means, explore the new dividers; just don't expect them to change your life.

The one exception to the rule seems to be heavy multitasking scenarios. As we saw from our simple DVDShrink + Doom 3 test, when you run two very memory bandwidth dependent applications on a dual core processor at the same time, the benefits of these faster memory speeds really starts to show itself. We measured a 6.5% increase in performance in the aforementioned test, but next to no performance improvement in other lighter multitasking scenarios. As we continue to develop our multitasking benchmark suites, we will now start looking at how added memory bandwidth, made possible through these new dividers, changes the performance picture.