Increased Bandwidth
The speed of memory has not historically increased inline with CPU improvements. In order to increase the bandwidth of memory modules the prefetch buffer reads data from multiple memory chips simultaneously. This is similar to a RAID array in the storage world. Also it is similar to the concept of Dual Channel memory - but the extra channels are internal to each module. Sequential access bandwidth is markedly improved using prefetch buffers, but random access is mostly unchanged.
Read more about this topic: Prefetch Buffer
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