What is memory interleaving and what advantage does it provide?
Even though the system data bus is 64 bits wide, the memory controller in Power Macintosh 7300, 7500, 7600, 8500, 8600, 9500, and 9600 computers can support 128 bit data read and write operations by interleaving data between corresponding DIMMS. Memory interleaving provides higher bandwidth (MBytes per second) between the PowerPC microprocessor and main memory. It also provides a significant performance boost, increasing the execution speed of memory-intensive programs. How much faster depends on the program’s software architecture and whether an L2 cache is present.
