You can't exchange speed with size when talking about ram.

Fanboys always use better specs to feel better, in both groups. I don't know how often I had to read "the hard facts" about the technical superiority of PS4.

What? IIRC the exact opposite was the case. They reserved too much in comparison to 360 and had to work very hard to reduce memory usage. This time they even reserved more but it seems to be no critical limit, currently. They have enough room to optimize *or* extend os features *or* even both.

Yes, and those threads are annoying too. Games and price were huge factors in my decision to buy a console. Technical aspects took a backseat. I hate famboys of all systems equally. Just enjoy your console and don't waste time smearing the other one.

Swapping has *never* been a good thing on PC, seriously. Especially not with performance-critical applications.

Directly from the link: "I/O (input/output) speed was a big problem, even from the hard drive. Input/Output speed is the communication speed between the drive and the CPU." Swapping is the worst case.

SOny learned from the mistake that was the PS3 OS RAM limitations.

For the PS3 Sony gave over most of the RAM to the developers and had little headroom to enhance the PS3 OS in doing so. After all they couldn't very well "take back" RAM as it would cause poor performance in games that relied on the extra memory.

This time around they have reserved a significant amount to allow for room to grow so to speak. Once the OS has reached a level of maturity (after adding DLNA .mp3 support and any other features) well into the console cycle and Sony feels like they have reached a point where there is little more to add then they can relenquish whatever RAM is left over to games and developers can take advantage of it. 

Besides 4.5 GB is plenty for any game today or even tomorrow. RAM is not a bottleneck in either of these new consoles.

thank god ms/sony didn't decide to go with only 4gb ram ...
512mb for games would be funny :p

Wrong. Early on Sony released a majority of the RAM to developers which is why many features that 360 owners got such as cross game chat never made it to the PS3. They simply had no room to implement it.

"Once a game gets RAM we never give it back, it's not possible to retrofit something like that after the fact."  - Shuhei Yoshida on why PS3 will never get cross game chat.

Well, they reduced the amount of ram used by the os. If they had kept the initial ram size they would have had room for more features but they decided to put it on to the game side, obviously.

The ps3 os was too complex to make it in any way compete with the size of 350's. Glad they chose bsd this time.

Of course you dont use it for critical things, but as long as you know what your doing and manage it with none critical data it can be extremley usefull. You can misuse most systems in a computer that doesnt make them shit, just cos you dont have a clue what your doing.