Bandwidth and Latency: An Introduction

From the bygone debates over DDR vs. RDRAM to the current controversy over Apple's DDR implementations, one issue is commonly misunderstood in most discussions of memory technology: the nature of the relationship between bandwidth and latency. This article aims to give you a basic grasp of the complex and subtle interaction between bandwidth and latency, so that the next time you see bandwidth numbers quoted for a system you'll be able to better understand how those numbers translate into real-world performance.