The Obsession With Speed

MEMORY SPEED is one of the most convoluted specifications around, and is often misrepresented. Way back when, in the early days of SDRAM development, the megahertz measurement was the correct way of advertising the associated speeds of memory. In short, every single solid-state component in your machine operates at a specific frequency, or Hz—whether it’s your processor, GPU, memory, or even SSD, each one operates on a cycle. Like the ticking of a clock, each tick represents a single hertz or cycle (the opening and closing of a transistor gate, in this case). A speed of 1Hz, for example, is one cycle per second; 2Hz is two per second; a MHz is 1,000,000 cycles per second; you get the picture.

The problem is, when DDR (or double data rate) RAM came on the scene, it changed how data transfers were registered. Instead of only actuating once on the rising of each clock cycle, it could now also process an additional operation on the fall of that same clock cycle, effectively doubling the rate at which the DIMM could process data. The figure for accurate measurement of data transfer requests then shifted from MHz to MT/s to adjust for this change, despite the fact that memory still operated at the same frequency. However, marketing apparently didn’t get that memo, because many companies, in a bid to tout it as the next big thing, ignored the MT/s figure, instead referring to it as MHz, while modern-day memory quoted at 2,400MHz, for instance, only operates at half that frequency.