MikeB on 12 October 2007
@ LordTheNightKnight
This is where the tiny claim falls short. Looking at the tech specs for the SNES, Mega Drive, Turbo Grafix-16, and Neo-Geo, the actual contemporary systems of the 4th gen, we see the SNES actually had the most system RAM, 128KB, compared to 64KB for the Mega Drive and Neo-Geo, and 8KB for the TG-16.
RAM is expensive and game consoles were designed to be cheap, but consumer electronics like the CDi and CDTV as released in 1991 (Snes was launched in Europe in 1992) offered mutliple times more memory, thus this was still a tiny amount of RAM to deal with, nomatter if other consoles had tiny amount of RAM as well.
And if you are going to insist on including the original Amiga's 512KB, you HAVE to compare the PS3's 512MB to the 1-2GB of a typical new PC.
Amigas didn't need to boot a full OS, the kickstart chip included the core OS and drivers, allowing you to directly boot into disc or CD based games without having to go through a GUI or CLI.
AmigaOS was also rather efficient, let's just take Crysis as an example. The game requires 1.5 GB of RAM in combination with Vista and 1 GB of RAM in combination with XP. This 500 MB difference is probably just caused by the OS being even less optimised and more bloated than Windows XP already is. As Windows uses up so many resources the comparison is flawed, on the PS3 you don't have to boot up an inefficient OS first to play a game.
Personally I am more a fan of the AmigaOS-approach, I wish there was a modern efficient OS available maybe based on technically impressive OSes like BeOS or the QNX Neutrino microkernel. I would like to see operating systems become more efficient and thus more powerful with new releases, not slower. My old Amiga 2000 always responded to my user input, nomatter how many files I was transferring or applications I was running in the background (even at 7 Mhz), sadly that's not the case for Windows even with my multi-Ghz setup.
