Understanding Bandwidth and Latency

Since we started Ars about five years ago, computing performance has come to be bound more and more by bandwidth. This is especially true in the past two years, with Intel and AMD aggressivly increasing processor performance to the point where the rest of the average PC system lags behind in its ability to keep the CPU fed with code and data. With bandwidth being such an important consideration in discussions of everything from motherboards to graphics cards, I thought it would be useful to devote an entire article to exploring bandwidth and its relationship to another important factor affecting system performance: latency.


This article should provide you with a useful foundation for understanding bandwidth, latency and performance in a variety of systems and settings. I've tried to present the basic concepts as clearly as possible, so that you can easily refer back to this article when you read product reviews, forum discussions, and the like. So the next time you set out to ponder the P4's frontside bus or the XServe's memory subsystem, you'll hopefully have a better grasp of how these components do and do not contribute to overall system performance.

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