512 MB of Wii U's RAM "reserved for the OS. What's the total?

[Andrespetmonkey]

Pemalite said:

Andrespetmonkey said:

If 4gb only costs £10 then I don't see why consoles can't have at least that. How cheap would that be if bought in very large amounts?

Edit: Just found this whilst googaling prices. lol

That was done in 2006.

I know, I just find it funny how only 5 years later 8gb is recommended whilst they were wondering if 2gb would be too much.

Since then, games want more memory, 4gb should be the minimum these days for PC's. Heck I noticed a small difference between moving from 4gb to 8gb of ram when alt-tabbing out of high-end games, didn't notice much with 32gb of ram though.
However, the PC is also allot more versatile and has to do allot more things in tandem, so the need for more ram is there.

http://blogs.bettor.com/Battlefield-3-developer-wants-8GB-of-RAM-in-the-PS4-and-Xbox-720-a1356

Seems every developer is screaming for more ram in the next lot of consoles.

However, the tricky part is the Video card often has to use the consoles ram for Video memory, So fast memory is just as important as lots of memory... Which is just like with IGP's in the PC space, which gain allot more performance with faster Ram.
And fast memory (Talking about faster than DDR3 here folks) is expensive as it isn't on the same level of being mass produced as the PC's DDR3 memory, so Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony need to balance the speed vs performance of the ram in their consoles to fit in a certain price budget.