NEWS: Notebook Makers Look To Have 4GB RAM Next Year

**TechZ** · December 24th, 2007, 11:07 AM

Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba are planning to introduce notebooks which come standard with 4GB of memory next year. According to the report, this is being done in an attempt to boost the DRAM industry, which is suffering significant losses due to component memory chips being sold below production costs at the present time. A 4GB DRAM requires 32 1Gbit component chips, as opposed to only eight for a 1GB DRAM module. According to Digitimes, 1GB DRAM modules now cost $16. A 2GB modules will drop to $60 in Q1 2008. A 4GB DRAM module will only account for 6% of the total cost of a notebook, which is notably lower than the 10% premium memory consumed in the past.

**CCT** · December 24th, 2007, 09:35 PM

To my mind, the question then becomes:

'How much memory does a laptop need to perform to laptop requirements?'

I have 2 Gbytes (edit: on a desktop) and have never had a memory shortage playing intensive games.

So, unless you were involved in something truly epic in the memory-intensive areas, what good is 4 Gbytes?

I look at it as power consumption + cpu tasking etc versus utility.

Is there a benefit?

**Guts3d** · December 25th, 2007, 06:12 AM

Bragging rights?

**NooNoo** · December 25th, 2007, 11:57 AM

It means that all the spyware has plenty of ram, so the computer is not slowed down...

**JPnyc** · December 28th, 2007, 10:36 AM

anything over three gig will be useless unless you have a 64-bit operating system. 32-bit OS only recognizes 3 gigabyte of RAM, at least as far as Windows is concerned.

**CeeBee** · December 28th, 2007, 11:00 AM

In other news XP-FLP runs just fine with 256M RAM, so it can be done... I hate programmers who make big & slow code because the computers are powerful enough to run it.