| VGKing said: Is it worth it though? 4GB was enough to be competitive and it could have given them a price advantage. |
These pictures are nice but don't really tell the whole story. You can put bigger rams into your PC because the address lines on the pcbs are there, You will not be able to put 64G ram modules into your PC because the address lines are NOT there. So the question is: Were the address lines (in this case it would only take one additional line) already on the pcb when they designed it with 4G in mind? Probably not (every line is additional costs, so they did redesign the pcb (which had to be done anyways because there likely were "things to relocate" anyways for the final board.
Going from 4G to 8G is the result of many factors. The first one is certainly the price and availability of the 4GBit chips. Then Sony got first look at early launch titles and probably saw that at 4G, things were getting tight (with all the multimedia os stuff around one "needs to have nowadays", and bloated software due to "we have so much memory now"). Engineering might have dissected an XBox and saw that the price was high, too. Ultimately the bean counters decided (they always do, and they probably learned from the 256M/256M PS3 fiasco) to allow for 8G memory.
