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Whitepaper – Balanced Memory with 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon Scalable Processors
© 2019 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries.
Internal Use - Confidential
4.3 Identical Channel Population
Intel® Xeon™ scalable processors will have six channels, identified in Figure 4 as one
to six, with up to two slots per channel, identified as A and B. Optimal performance is
achieved when a channel is completely populated. For example, Figure 4 would have
to have the inner grey slots A1, A2, A3, A4, A5 and A6 populated to fulfill this guideline.
This guideline also applies to the outer black B slots, which can only be populated once
the grey slots are populated. Therefore, only a total of six or twelve DIMMs can be
balanced to return the best bandwidth and latency. When mirrored channels are
identically, yet only partially, populated then the configuration is near balanced. For
example, if A1, A2, A4 and A5 were populated while A3 and A6 were empty, this
configuration would be near balanced. Near balanced and full balanced configurations
are similar because they both only create one interleave set, but because near
balanced does not populate every channel slot for A, the performance will degrade in
comparison to balanced.
Figure 4: Memory channels are broken out into columns A and B, with six channels for each column