snowdog on 02 October 2011
| HappySqurriel said: Just on a side note about memory prices and consoles ... One of the reasons consoles (generally) have far less memory than their PC counterparts is that console manufacturers tend to favour higher quality memory over higher quantities of memory. As a result of this, it makes more sense to look at the price of DDR 3 in the 2000+ range than it does to look at the price of DDR 2 memory in the 1000 range. While Nintendo might not choose to use DDR memory at all, it is likely that the memory they will choose will be fairly high end and similar in cost to high end DDR memory. The reason for this is that memory access is very costly, and in high performance systems memory tends to act as a bottleneck. Often real world performance can be dramatically increased in a system without increasing theoritical processing power of the CPU/GPU simply by using much faster memory. |
Quite right. And it should be mentioned that whilst your bog standard PC RAM is cheap you won't find it going anywhere near a console. Console RAM isn't on a stick lol, it's embedded onto a chip so is a great deal more expensive.
It should also be noted that you probably won't even find as much as 2Gb of total RAM on a console next gen - we'll probably see 1Gb of VRAM for the GPU and 512Mb of system RAM. Any more than 512Mb of system RAM is overkill due to console operating systems having such a small footprint. Developers may want 4Gb or 8Gb of RAM but there's no way that's going to happen next gen unless you want to pay a ridiculous amount of money for a console.
