88+16+512(?)+3 Who said Wii would have no RAM at all? This makes me think : how long does it take to do access on the SD cart? Could it possibly be used as a RAM expansion? PS : The whole article can be found here http://wii.ign.com/articles/713/713262p1.html
the 512 will be too slow to be used as RAM in the traditional sense, when talking about system RAM generally people talk about it not as memory which is random access, but memory that is mighty fast AND Random Access. In reality (if these specs are true) it's 104mb system
I think the 512 memory is more like a buffer for game data. The console can load up a certain amount of data off the disc in the background, onto the flash RAM and then quickly load it onto the main RAM. There is flash RAM that is fast enough for transfering large amounts of data. Probably there to act as an "HDD" functions in the 360 and XBOX but only per game that is loaded into the console. This will hopefully reduce loading times and the amount of loading screens that would appear if they didnt' have this flash ram. But again this is just my speculation and seems to be a logical use of flash RAM.
No, it won't be used like that. It's flash RAM which has a restrictive number of writes before failure (about 100,000 I think), so it won't be used for any temporary or frequently changing data.
Pretty much the same as I was thinking. But to compare flash to standard RAM is just a flawed comparision - it is not the same, and it is not as fast, for now at least.
Thinking about it a bit more, potentially some game data could be pre-loaded onto the flash memory the first time the game is run. I don't think flash is much faster than a disc drive anyway (considerably lower latency though, I'd imagine).
Flash is faster than Hard disks - otherwise there would be no point in hybrid hard disks (std. hard disk plus flash as a buffer)
This is a (somewhat) flawed belief. While it is true that flash RAM does have a limited number of "write" cycles, chips today are quite intelligentlly controlled so that *every* segment would be used once before one was written to a second time. The end result is a much longer MTBF than the average person would think just by glancing at write limits. Needless to say, you could easily use flash RAM as a cache drive and not have to worry about flash failure over the life of the device. In fact, there are some nifty brand new laptops hitting the market that use flash drives exclusively and Windows Vista has a function to let you use a USB 2.0 flash drive as dedicated, high speed swap space to help speed up the system. Write cycles are not a major concern. -hl718
