Given today's pricing environment around system memory, a Phoronix Premium supporter recently requested some benchmarks to quantify the performance difference from single to dual channel memory. In considering a new computer build, he is contemplating whether to go for a single stick of DDR5 memory until memory prices hopefully subside in the future. For those in a similar boat, here are some benchmarks of single versus dual channel memory on an Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus "Arrow Lake" desktop.

This testing is quite straight-forward to satisfy a premium reader's request around a new build... Namely whether one stick of DDR5 RAM would be sufficient for a new computer build at least temporarily until memory prices subside. A particular interest expressed by the reader in code compilation performance. Using an Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, I ran a wide variety of Linux performance benchmarks with both single and dual channel memory.

The single memory stick was a Crucial Pro DDR5-6400 CL40 32GB (20CP2K32G64C40U5B) while the dual channel configuration was of a similar Crucial Pro setup with the 2 x 16GB DDR5-6400 CL38 CP16G64C38U5B memory kit. The same Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus system running Ubuntu 26.04 with the Linux 7.0 kernel was used for this testing and no other changes besides swapping out the system memory between test runs.