Shoutbox

quote:

---

Originally posted by blade

quote:

---

Can you handle more power?

---

---

4mb ! THE POWA!


Anyways, thx Ddunk & Patchou

---

Well as much as I hate Ninty thats a 100% increase in Ram:


"There is a trend forming to use a Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) in forthcoming systems. The abortive M2 console also features a UMA. Although the Atari Jaguar was the first console to use a UMA, the Nintendo 64 is the most successful. A UMA uses a single chunk of RAM. All processors access and share the same memory.

The advantages of using a UMA is that the programmer can decide how much memory to allocate to program code, graphics data, screen buffer, audio data etc. In older systems (including the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn), memory was assigned for certain tasks (1 megabyte VRAM, 2 Megabytes Main RAM etc). If a game does not use all the sound memory, it cannot be used for bitmaps. The UMA is a more flexible architecture.

The Nintendo 64 uses 36Mbits of RAMBUS 9bit DRAM. In more common terms this equates to 4 megabytes. The extra bit is presumably used for parity. The chips use a fast 8bit channel running at approximately 500Mhz. This yields a bandwidth of 520.5MB/sec or 4,500M bit/sec (exact benchmarks vary). The high speed of the memory, coupled with a 256k cache for both the R4300i and RCP, allow the system to make full use of the UMA.

There is an extra 4 megabytes of RDRAM (Expansion Pak) which plug into the front expansion connector on the top of the N64 taking the total amount of RAM in the system to 8 megabytes."

Detailed Specs