Monday, October 22, 2007

The world ends at 4 GB

I had the opportunity to ponder upon this problem last Friday (19 Oct). Having been assigned the responsibility of speccing out a machine for computational intensive program, I shopped around Dell's website looking to customise a machine.

"Budget is not a problem, just get a machine that is really powerful."

So I picked the best CPU, fastest/biggest HDD... and ram?

"Wah, got 8GB ram out there huh!"

"Buy, buy!"

I think almost all of our CS1104 has gone rusty. Nobody even recalled the memory limitation.

"Cannot lar, 32-bit OS can only address up to 4Gb right?"

In fact, buying 4GB will already has some wastage ok. Look at this:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000811.html

This is an excellent article that explained how even with hacks to make 32bit OS address more memory, it is still very nasty and best advised not to do it. Also include a very detailed explanation of the "memory hole" and some other tidbits =)

Learning something new everyday! =D