As memory operations happens in 64 bytes chunks, it appear that ganged mode will always win: it can spread that 64 bytes operations on the two memory channel, while the unganged mode will only use a single memory channel. The reality, however, is the the unganged mode rarely suffer from this problem, because normally there are many outstanding memory request to be completed, so there are many outstanding cache line to be fetched from or stored to main memory. While the ganged mode will be faster in operating on a single cache line, the unganged mode can theoretically operate on two cache line at a given moment (with some restrictions). This parallelism can be realized because the memory controller incorporate an 8 entry depth memory controller queue (the “MCQ” box in the drawing above), for a total of 8 outstanding cache line requests.
However, simply stating that the unganged mode has the potential to be often on par with the ganged mode is not enough: in this case, we can simply use the ganged mode and forget about the unganged mode. The point is that the unganged mode has potential to be faster that ganged mode. Why? Because we must realize that main memory access don't happen immediately, as the DRAM chip require many ns to be accessed: after this initial access time the data can be transferred quite quickly, but the initial access steps can be very slow (from a processor standpoint). Starting two memory operations at the same time, the memory controller has the possibility to hide at least partially the latency involved in the setup steps of the second operations. Obviously this is not always true, but it is a possibility indeed and, so, this can be an advantage of unganged vs ganged method. Moreover, using the unganged mode the memory controller can theoretically both write to and read from memory at the same time: this should help memory copy routines and multitasking operating system, where many processes can both read from and write to memory at the same time.
Summarizing the whole point, we can state that:
the ganged mode has the potential to be faster than unganged mode because it use a more fine grained interleave mode
the unganged mode has the potential to be faster than ganged mode because it can start two memory operations at the sime time, effectively hiding at least part of the latency involved in the second operation. Also, this mode permit to both read from and write to memory at the same time, with the intrinsic advantages that this possibility implies.
http://www.ilsistemista.net/index.p...-the-ganged-vs-unganged-question.html?start=1
