Can a single core saturate a CPU's memory IO bandwidth?

Question

Assuming an ideal situation: nothing is paged out, all code is really well written and fits in cache, the scheduler never interrupts you, etc.: can a single core in a multi-core CPU generate enough write traffic to saturate the IO bus to the DIMMs?

In a more concrete form: If I were to launch a program that does a 16GB memset in one thread, would it run any slower than a pair of non overlapping 8GB memsets? (The size is chosen to be large enough to reach steady state.)

Answer 1

See http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/detecting-memory-bandwidth-saturation-in-threaded-applications/