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RazorDragon on 21 July 2013
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walsufnir said:
farlaff said:
Egann said:

Maybe, but why upgrade hardware when a firmware update can do the same thing? With a system as low power as the Wii U, you don't necessarily need a RAM chip to pretend you have additional memory. Just convert 2 or 4 GB of the Wii U flash memory into SWAP and suddenly the Wii U has as much "RAM" as the XBox One. Especially if there's CPU power to spare and you can dedicate a whole core to flipping memory between memory pools, and this article implies there's more than enough for that.

If Nintendo really gets into a memory pickle, that's what they'll do.

Cool, never knew it could be done. How's that possible?


This wonderful tech is called "paging". Given that PS4 and Xbone both have 500G disks, this is just brilliant. Oh wait, swapping is the hell for everything that computes... Especially with traditional hard-drives.


Wii U has flash memory, though, which means access times are as fast as DRAM's, compared to the >9ms acess times traditional 7200RPM HDs have. Of course, read/write speed would still be big a problem, but as ReadyBoost on Windows already told us, paging can be done if you use flash memories.