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165 Comments
- ace77, on 10/12/2007, -3/+98@akirakurosawa
Did you read the article? - OneManArmy, on 10/12/2007, -7/+91Ignorance is bliss akirakurosawa
- PleaseBeSerious, on 10/12/2007, -8/+82And if you don't know how a tire is made then you shouldn't be allowed to change a flat on your car.
Am I following your logic correctly? - naldwell, on 10/12/2007, -17/+88"What the hell do you do that requires 4 gigs???"
Runs Vista? - gweedo767, on 10/12/2007, -1/+55@ani-
Yup, that is what 64-bit addressing can do for you. - doctechnical, on 10/12/2007, -4/+52Good article, nice explanation of how the Win32 memory map works in basic terms. Dugg.
"Oh, we used to DREAM of 64 kilobytes! Would have been heaven to us..."
Thank your lucky stars all that Expanded vs Extended memory crap is dead and buried (shudder). - TheTankengine, on 10/12/2007, -2/+40Why is it awkward? Do you really care what newegg thinks about your ram purchasing habits?
- Guspaz, on 10/12/2007, -4/+36Gah, damn you edit time limit! OS X does in fact support 64-bit addressing, it's the machine itself that can't take more than 16 GB of memory.
Of course, one needs to keep in mind that 4GB DIMMs sell for about $1200 US or more. - evilbert420, on 10/12/2007, -15/+44Seriously?
Umm... audio editing/music production, video production, development (database), virtual machines, etc.
Hell, 2 Gigs with Vista is like 1 Gig with XP. - dBLiSS, on 10/12/2007, -0/+26It's actually a 32-bit x86 memory map. No necessarily specific to windows.
- mgrucker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+27since when? two 1GB and two 512MB will still run dual channel.
- Rickler, on 10/12/2007, -9/+342gigs in vista can't be compared to XP that easily. It's basically like having a superfast 2gb flash hdd in XP because of vista's prefech actually using memory like it should be.
- TonyCubed, on 10/12/2007, -2/+23We can tell you're talking ***** since it's a problem with the x86 platform all together, not just ***** Windows.
- SteveMax, on 10/12/2007, -0/+212x1024 + 2x512 = 3072 (or: 2 1GB sticks in dual-channel plus 2 512MB sticks in dual-channel gives you 3 GB total, with all dual-channel benefits)
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+23Why Ubuntu?
WTF is with all the trendy Ubuntu ***** these days? - Terc, on 10/12/2007, -4/+23@OneManArmy
No, ignorance is a great way to waste some cash - NeoCortex, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19Yeah, I got hit with this "feature" when I ordered my Dell XPS a few years back. I checked the option for WinXP Pro and for 4 GB of RAM. Of course, they don't mention that even offering that as an option is completely pointless unless you change OS afterwards. Imagine my initial confusion at seeing 4GB on my BIOS screen and only 3GB in Windows.
Well, live and learn. - fantasticjon, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18@Ramble.
You think that if someone doesn't happen to know something that you happen to know, then they are a moron. I find that most truly intelligent people are smart enough to realize how little they know. - bigtomrodney, on 10/12/2007, -4/+19I think a better analogy should be you shouldn't be allowed to buy a tire without knowing your wheel size. Might make more sense.
- emorphien, on 10/12/2007, -3/+18I've got 4gb too, but no reason for more fortunately.
- mgrucker, on 10/12/2007, -3/+18hmmm, what does two 1GB modules and two 512MB modules add up to?
- MadMaxx426, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14The only problem with the article is that it talks about "applications" wanting more than 2gig. No matter how much physical RAM is in a machine, the virtual address space does not change (but the allocation of it can -- more on that in a sec). Applications themselves do NOT talk to ram, and they are ignorant to how much "ram" they really have (physical) -- it's always 2gig user mode to them. VA space does not map 1:1 with the physical location -- the memory manager is in charge of translating back and forth from the virtual world to the physical world for all processes. There are very few exceptions..I'll cover that at the end.
The virtual address space is 4gig total in size (2^32), split between user mode and kernel mode (2gig each). The only "tweak" that can be done is using the /3GB switch, which mearely changes the allocation to 3gig user, 1gig kernel. You are robbing peter to pay paul... and you must use /3GB in conjunction with some other tweaks in order to avoid a PTE exhaustion condition. The overall constraints haven't changed.
Physical ram is used as a storage point for values. When a value is no longer required, or something else has requested use of that space, the memory manager will move it's value and location to the page file (please note: that is an extremely 60' view of it...we can discuss the workings of the MM later). The act of paging, and thus the subsequent amount of times it does it is reflected by how much ram there is to use for caching. The bigger the container (more ram) the more it can store without having to flush to disk. Since we all know physical disk speeds are much slower than ram, we see the performance impact by having lots of cache-able space available. There are many more factors, but again, this isn't a thread on how the guts of the memory manager work ;)
Now, the only exception to this is when "applications" have either been written explicitly for communicating with physical addresses (you find these on hardware -- assembly language talking to rom maps for example) or have extensions built into them to change their behavior. One such behavior is an "override" switch which locks pages in memory, rather than flushing them. What this means is that the app requests that the chunks of memory usage (virtual address) be held in physical memory rather being flushed. This effectively "consumes" that address block at the physical level for nothing but that process.
I'm not going to get into PAE (just know it was a physical addition to motherboards to make up to 2^32 bits adressable via some cool address space hacks) and AWE...unless someone asks ;)
James - TonyCubed, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15I'm still not getting why 1GB - 512MB - 1GB - 512MB doesn't make sense. If you cannot utilise a 4th GB module, then you go with two 512MB modules so you can have 3GB's with Dual Channel memory. Is it that hard to understand or something?
- ChronicColonic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Using this analogy, we could assume that when you go to purchase four tires, you can tell the salesman that you only want three, because you know the fourth tire is not going to be used.
....oh wait. - Guspaz, on 10/12/2007, -15/+27Actually, OS X doesn't support 64-bit addressing. 16GB represents just 34-bit addressing. Or perhaps 32-bit addressing with some trickery going on.
True 64-bit addressing supports 17179869184 gigabytes (16 exabytes IIRC). Not 16 gigabytes. - dawgma, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Photoshop can use up to 6GB in 64bit Windows XP. Mostly this is used as a fast-access scratch drive so that it is easy to skip between history states and have many large files open at once.
- MadMaxx426, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10@pyite
"Your mistake would be to run Windows in the first place - now is the best time to get rid of your legacy Windows OS and switch to Mac or Ubuntu Linux."
Be aware that Linux/Mac(anything really) on any 32 bit processor uses the same memory layout as any flavor of windows. Let's not turn this into a "...but my Linux can do it better..." when this is a *hardware* limitation of 32bit processing :p - Hungryhaney, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10@pants428
i have 2 x 256GB (stock), 2 x 512GB, and 2x1GB
Wow, thats like a TON of GBs you have for RAM there. :-) - Dylan16807, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Chemical reaction? Does your car also need headlight fluid?
- TonyCubed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9You could just get 2x1GB modules and 2x512MB modules, then you have Dual Channel memory as well 3GB and not waste money on the extra GB.
- MadMaxx426, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10"I'm not going to get into PAE (just know it was a physical addition to motherboards to make up to 2^32 bits adressable via some cool address space hacks) and AWE...unless someone asks ;)"
Missed my edit time :(
That should read "makes 2^36 adressable" -- and we're talking about physical ram communications -- the virtual memory address is still 4 gig. When AWE kicks in (apps must be written for it), a chunk of kenel mode is carved out and used as a "bridge" to the higher address range. Chunks are windowed in and out at this point, like a star gate. The only problem is, it reduces the size of your kernel space (especially when used w/ /3GB...bad things are going to happen!). More often than not, you'll end up bugchecking the box -- trying to cram modern video memory and everything else down into kernel mode when you reduce it to ~750meg (/3GB + PAE) of address space is not a good idea. - emorphien, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9I tried a few things when I was getting mine to work, Vista runs just fine on 1 or 2gb, no worse than XP. I have 4gb for doing work.
- newsheatdotcom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Man, makes me feel old
My first PC: Commodore 64, Clock speed: 1.023 MHz, 64 KiB of RAM -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 - wilf_brim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8"Oh, 32 kilobytes. Luxury. I had a computer that had 8 kilobytes that I had to a program by hand with jagged wire, and had to power myself with a generator that I ran with a rusty bike that I made with war surplus parts. This after I had walked to school 8 miles each way uphill, clean the shack with my tounge, and get beaten sensless by my pa. And the kids today, wouldn't believe us."
(A take off on an old Monty Python sketch). - evilbert420, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Didn't read the article, did you?
- geocar, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9I have several intel systems using PAE to access more than 4GB of memory. Some Windows builds support a /PAE flag (Windows Advanced Server, Datacenter server) that you can add to boot.ini to use all your RAM, but home users are out of luck.
Updating the PAE tables is /much/ faster than swapping, and don't let anyone tell you different. - SmokeyTreats, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9"every motherboard I'm aware of will happily accept 2 x 1 GB and 2 x 512 MB DIMMs."
- Ahnteis, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9No. Tire SIZE is comparable to knowing which generation of memory you need -- DDR, DDR2, etc.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6yes, as long as the memory is in matched pairs it doesn't matter if the pairs match each other... In my Powermac G5 right now i have 2 x 256GB (stock), 2 x 512GB, and 2x1GB with 2 slots still open and each pair is running in dual channel mode...
- Aard88, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7My new motherboard specs claim it can handle up to 16 GB of RAM (only 2 slots). I am waiting for the 8 GB memory sticks to come out. Until then I guess I will muddle along with the pitiful 2 GB.
- saleens281, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6If you still aren't seeing it it's a simple BIOS setting to change the memory mapping.
- mgrucker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5*sigh* how many times do I have to post this :(
two 1GB plus two 512MB = 3GB in dual channel
seriously, read THEN post - Siroro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5High polygon 3D modeling, would chew through 4GB, not to mention many application & game developers would love that to be the standard.
- daofma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"Not a good idea to mix and match different ram types or sizes."
It's the latency and clock speeds you've got to watch out for. If you've got RAM with different latencies or clock speeds, whatever RAM is slowest is the deciding factor. That's the only reason not to mix different RAM. Size makes no difference. - lilrabbit129, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"Or you could stop pussy footing around and buy 1 4gb chip and have 7 slots open for upgrading, must rember upgrade cost when choosing memory, to get too the next step if it will cost you to remove chips it is worth while to buy bigger rams.
And who doesnt like RAM? Like think back when you would pray for 64mb you need your OS swimming in fast ram"
I think the reason he (or she) had so many different types is that, as you upgrade you add bigger chips. So they could have started with 2x256, then added 2x512 when they were cheap, then a year or so later 2x1GB cause those are cheap. Thats the beauty of having so many slots, you the luxury of "growing" your ram. - daofma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Argh! Wrong comment reply!
This is a response to someone down below.
@dbr_onix
You aren't a gamer, are you? Most gamers know that the easiest way to get more performance out of almost any game is to get more RAM. RAM makes up for slow hard drives by allowing more data to be easily accessible after load-time. A game like WoW would like to load over a gigabyte of data into memory if it could, but lots of it gets shunted off into virtual memory on the hard drive. Thus the more data you can get to be stored in memory, the faster the game will run.
I can't speak from experience in other fields, but in gaming this is certainly the case (even if I bungled some of the specifics). - iceperson, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7"True, but awkward to buy 2 1GB sticks and 2 more 512MB sticks..........."
Some people plan to use their hardware longer than their OS. I personally didn't like the idea of having to replace 2 512s with 2 1GBs when 64bit OSes start getting more hardware vendor support... - SteelChicken, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4and what does that have to do with memory or the OS, sounds like motherboard issues to me.
- magichappens, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4hehe, my first computer was a Commodore Vic-20 - my how far we've come :)
- Guard, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I personally had no trouble at all running Vista x64 with 4GB RAM. Windows XP reads it as 3.25GB ram though, but I've been told theres ways to fix that problem, just haven't worried about it.
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