Independent memory channels: What does it mean for a programmer

Question

I read the Datasheet for an Intel Xeon Processor and saw the following:

The Integrated Memory Controller (IMC) supports DDR3 protocols with four independent 64-bit memory channels with 8 bits of ECC for each channel (total of 72-bits) and supports 1 to 3 DIMMs per channel depending on the type of memory installed.

I need to know what this exactly means from a programmers view.
The documentation on this seems to be rather sparse and I don't have someone from Intel at hand to ask ;)

1. Can this memory controller execute 4 loads of data simultaneously from non-adjacent memory regions (and request each data from up to 3 memory DIMMs)? I.e. 4x64 Bits, striped from up to 3 DIMMs, e.g:
   | X | _ | X | _ | X | _ | X |
   (X is loaded data, _ an arbitrarily large region of unloaded data)

2. Can this IMC execute 1 load which will load up to 1x256 Bits from a contiguous memory region.
   | X | X | X | X | _ | _ | _ | _ |

Answer 1

This seems to be implementation specific, depending on compiler, OS and memory controller. The standard is available at: http://www.jedec.org/standards-documents/docs/jesd-79-3d . It seems that if your controller is fully compliant there are specific bits that can be set to indicate interleaved or non-interleaved mode. See page 24,25 and 143 of the DDR3 Spec, but even in the spec details are light.

For the i7/i5/i3 series specifically, and likely all newer Intel chips the memory is interleaved as in your first example. For these newer chips and presumably a compiler that supports it, yes one Asm/C/C++ level call to load something large enough to be interleaved/striped would initiate the required amount of independent hardware channel level loads to each channel of memory.

In the Triple channel section in of the Multichannel memory page on wikipedia there is a small list of CPUs that do this, likely it is incomplete: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-channel_memory_architecture