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My old G4 supports up to two gig of ram ad it was built in the pre-OSX age (2000) when 128meg was considered plenty for most people.
I have a gig and half in the sucker now. Thats over ten times what was needed back then.
Now you buy any Mac under a pro tower and you can only double todays norm of two gig.
Eight years and massive OS changes and Apple has only doubled the ram capacity of most of its rigs.

approximately 1000$ for a pair of 4 gb ddr3 1066 mhz

smilr wrote:

Umm - 32 bit addressing supports 4 gigabytes of ram. Most non 64 bit consumer processors ended up with a limit of 4 gigabytes, not 2.

64 bit processors can theoretically get us up to 16 Exabytes (taking wikipedia's word on that figure) of ram. What's probably happening is that the MEMORY CONTROLLERS that sit between the ram and the processor are only 32 bit addressing for cost / heat reasons.

So no - I doubt that a software / firmware patch will "fix" this. Most likely this is a hard-wire limitation of the motherboard in the new Powerbooks ^w MacbookPros.

NVIDIA representatives had stated that the new chipsets used in the MacBook and MacBook Pro could support up to 8GB of RAM. [..]

Preliminary results show that while the new MacBook Pro did recognize the entire 8GB of RAM, during actual usage, the computer appeared to be limited to 4GB: [etc]

Accounts differ. I expect the chipset can address 8GB as stated, but for yet-unknown reasons this seems not to be happening.

Intel CPUs have had 48-bit addressing available if unused at least since the P4 days, and the coming generation has on-die memory controllers such as AMD has had since introducing the Athlon 64. It will be interesting to see what the reason for this turns out to be.

If it was the kernel ... wouldn't the mac pros also be effected but this. or the g5 power mac for that matter.

More information on the subject:

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/for … 2000315931

kthxbye

They can take 6 GBs!

http://gizmodo.com/5072239/confirmed-ne … rt-6gb-ram

I'm gonna bet $.99 that it gets fixed with a firmware update and that 8GB will be around soon.

Last edited by Gipetto (2008-11-01 11:56 am)

[Bill Gates]We write windows code and expect the hardware to catch up later[/Bill Gates]

i'm going to say that my argument below is a dumb argument, but has to hold some ground...lol

everyone, at least at one point in life in tech has had to of said, ________ should be enough for anyone.

fill it in today with
• 1 Terahertz 40 core Processor
• 1 Petabyte

fill it in 20 years ago with
• 1 Gigabyte Hard Drive
• over a hundred megabytes of RAM

fill it in 30 years ago with .. something i can't grasp, as I'm too young...but gates was there.

Last edited by willywalloo (2008-11-07 11:26 pm)

June 23, 2008 (IDG News Service) Some of the most oft-repeated comments attributed to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates through the years were not uttered by Gates. Take for instance, "640K ought to be enough for anybody," which he supposedly said in 1981 to note that the 640KB of memory in IBM's PC was a significant breakthrough. Or his alleged comment that if General Motors "had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles per gallon."

The latter is listed at snopes.com as an urban legend, and Gates has addressed the 640K quote in interviews (see more coverage on our "Bill Gates Moves On" page).

"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time," he told Bloomberg Business News in 1996. "I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again. Do you realize the pain the industry went through while the IBM PC was limited to 640K? The machine was going to be 512K at one point, and we kept pushing it up. I never said that statement, I said the opposite of that."

To assemble comments Gates actually did make over the years, we pored through the extensive speech archive at the Microsoft Web site, as well as the IDG News Service story archives and [..]

...and much else you can dig up. Not only can no real record be found, it makes sense. Occam's razor.

indeed

pirloui wrote:

Besides (being Gates' or not), that statement is out of context. At a certain point in time, in a certain context, yes, 640K should have been enough for everyone..

There does seem to exist a certain weird bias towards low amounts of ram with many computer users, even many geeks.
People thought I was nuts when I had 64meg running 7.6, 128 under 8.6 and 640 running 9.2.2. But I never had any of the stability problems everyone else seemed to suffer from back then.
Now I have a gid and a half of ram and I consider that to be barely adequate. I have a few apps that once up and running can consume over 400megs by themselves and one, Thoth, that I have seen consume over a gig of ram when loading a couple of million headers.
Strikes me that 4gigs is an unreasonably low ram limit for any newish computer.

Pariah wrote:

pirloui wrote:

Besides (being Gates' or not), that statement is out of context. At a certain point in time, in a certain context, yes, 640K should have been enough for everyone..

There does seem to exist a certain weird bias towards low amounts of ram with many computer users, even many geeks.
People thought I was nuts when I had 64meg running 7.6, 128 under 8.6 and 640 running 9.2.2. But I never had any of the stability problems everyone else seemed to suffer from back then.
Now I have a gid and a half of ram and I consider that to be barely adequate. I have a few apps that once up and running can consume over 400megs by themselves and one, Thoth, that I have seen consume over a gig of ram when loading a couple of million headers.
Strikes me that 4gigs is an unreasonably low ram limit for any newish computer.

My remark about that statement isn't incompatible with that. What I mean to say, is depending of context, it's not imbecile. 

For being a pro machine, the MBP could have a higher max ram limit. I agree with that. Besides, 64bit applicatiosn are right behind the corner, and tax heavily on the ram.
My motherboard supports 8GB ram, and cost 70$. The 4GB I have now cost 55$.
On the other hand, the whole "computer" evolution have slowed down since 2000; five year old computers are perfectly useable today, which wasn't true in the 90s.

Last edited by pirloui (2008-11-09 11:24 am)