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New MacBooks and MacBook Pros Support Up to 6GB

gmcalpin said:
Allow me to be the second person to chime in and ask where you read this, because I've seen nothing saying that. I would already own one of the new MacBook Pros if I had.
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If you mean you'd buy a new MBP and install a pre-release Snow Leopard on it, that isn't really practical. Any benefit you might possibly gain by going from 6 to 8GB of RAM, you'd lose several times over in using a pre-release OS.
 
8gb will be supported when snow leopard is released. i guarantee it. right now this is not written in the OS. think about it. 1 year ago did apple plan to allow over 4gb of RAM in a notebook? no, they didnt care back then. they will allow it when time is necessary. it is a simple software update which will probably require snow leopard for the feature.
 
sprice25 said:
8gb will be supported when snow leopard is released. i guarantee it. right now this is not written in the OS. think about it. 1 year ago did apple plan to allow over 4gb of RAM in a notebook? no, they didnt care back then. they will allow it when time is necessary. it is a simple software update which will probably require snow leopard for the feature.
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This is just pure speculation on your part.
 
sprice25 said:
8gb will be supported when snow leopard is released. i guarantee it. right now this is not written in the OS. think about it. 1 year ago did apple plan to allow over 4gb of RAM in a notebook? no, they didnt care back then. they will allow it when time is necessary. it is a simple software update which will probably require snow leopard for the feature.
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If it were this straightforward then the Mac Pros and Xserves wouldn't be able to use 32GB of RAM.
Unless, as others have suggested, that there is something deep in the OS that checks what machine is being used and modifies memory usage on a per computer basis.

My gut says that it's in the EFI. I have yet to see somebody report with a test of a Vista x64 or Linux x64 install on a MB/MBP without using Boot Camp (no Boot Camp means interacting with EFI directly, as opposed to Boot Camp's BIOS emulation).

I also haven't seen a test of 8GB on a MB, which uses main RAM for graphics, and thereby doesn't surpass the 8GB limit.

Anybody test 8GB on a iMac? Hmm...
 
Eidorian said:
It's around 5% for not using dual channel. The biggest hit is going to be with integrated graphics and shared video RAM. You're going to want dual channel for that.
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Thanks Eidorian, this is all i needed to know. I will keep reading around to make for certain that I can just stick in the 6GB of RAM and not run any bu!!$h!t hacks or code to get the 6GB recognized.
 
shervieux said:
Well, I am not going to speak about OSX as there is not task manager where I can look at performance like in Windows (that I know of). Let me talk about Windows. I have seen Internet Explorer totally kill performance when opening up a large file that was generated out of SQL. in fact, watching the task manager; i have seen SQL eat up 2-3 gb on a 4 gb machine, I have also seen IE eat up the same. so yes Ram does matter - and the more the merrier.

But I see your point of some people overkill the RAM installation.
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in Mac = Activity Monitor.
PC hogs required more ram and uses differently than Mac Os

PS- when I typed in Mac = Activity Monitor i'm not trying to be a smart @$$. I'm just trying to let you know whre the task manager would be in Mac Os. Applications>Utilities>Activity Monitor.
 
6gb or 8gb. Wow, maybe I will buy one of those shiny screen laptops. Really this might make it easier to decide. I went into a Circuit City and every single windows laptop was also super glossy screen. I guess that is the way things are going to be. The fact it will support 6gb is great news. My Vista machine has 4gb but only sees 3gb and I'm not going to 64bit vista.
 
Patriks7 said:
Well I guess I would count as a typical user as I use my MacBook for only school work and a movie once in a while, yet I'm constantly using around 2.5 GB RAM and all I run is Safari, iTunes, VLC, Mail, iCal, Pages and once in a while KeyNote..
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There is Active, Free, and Inactive areas when looking at what you are using. i would like to see a screen shot of your activity monitor to see how your computer uses 2.5 GIGS to run those apps.

Understand that Inactive and FREE, are almost the same. Free means you have that amount of ram available and not used by anything else. Inactive means you've used but that amount is available upon need from any app to utilize.
 
jonhaxor said:
The big problem i have with the mac though, coming from Solaris and Linux, is that the performance of the VM in darwin is pretty suckish .. a better page scanner, some better collection algorithms, and a swap filesystem would be a nice improvement .. for example - when it comes to swap space you'll see that OS X will continue to add swapfiles under /private/var/vm in varying sizes and seems pretty slow to reclaim or release this space .. looking now - I've got about 954MB in free memory with 6 swap files taking up 1.536GB on my hard drive - i don't quite see the point of this as reading pages from a swapfile on disk vs reading them directly from the application on the same disk should get me similar performance provided that the filesystem isn't too badly fragmented (which is a whole other point of contention)
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In general, application code is not written to swap files. If it needs to be removed from RAM to make room for something else, it is just discarded, then will be paged in from the application binary again when next required.

There may be a few exceptions, e.g. PowerPC applications on an Intel Mac need to be converted to Intel code by Rosetta, and I expect they will be swapped out.

Swap files mainly contain data rather than code. They are only deleted once all the data located in a particular swap file no longer needs to be there (e.g. it has all been paged in or freed). Quitting multiple applications may be sufficient to trigger this, but logging out and back in again is usually more reliable. There is no "garbage collection" to shuffle data back from the newest/largest swap files to older/smaller ones.
 
Eidorian said:
So do we have a verifiable reason why 8 GB doesn't work?
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Not verifiable, but if we look at the pre-Santa Rosa chipset, we see that while teh CPU was 64-bit, the chip could only address 32-bit of total memory for a total of 4GB. With the system needing about 750MB of address space, plus any discrete GPU needing some addressing you could install 4GB but could only use a 3GB maximum.

This may be similar in that Nvidia has only allowed for a total of 8GB of memory addressing at this time, which would then be limited to about 7GB of actual RAM. The issues with 2x4GB sticks not working seems to be an easy firmware fix, but I have doubts that you'd be able to actually use the full 8GB on the new Mac notebooks.

(speculation)
 
Digital Skunk said:
No, you don't...
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lol. I come accross people like you EVERY day at work. The "know it all". The once who argue that they don't want 8gig iphone.. they want 3GIG iphone. etc... It provides humor really.

You should not really Assume. It doesn't look good for your part at ALL. In any case, My point is made. I do know what i talk about because i come around products like these EVERY DAY, and come accross "AVERAGE" "SERIOUS USERS" "PRO USERS" "TEENS" and "KNOW IT ALLS" ::cough cough::

Anyway i'm sure it will not matter. It will probably be great if they offered 10 gigs of ram because i'm pretty sure some "average" users will be there to buy it for running word and powerpoint.

Anyway my 2cents. People are free to use there computers how every they feel like it. After all it's their money/hobby/job/or interest. Some people use 6 gigs and it's great that they do. Ram does speed up some process in a computer.

And some people barely use word and itunes but want the macbook pro with 4 gigs of ram (coming from a pc). which again is FINE. My point is, if you are beyone the average user you understant what ram does and it's purposs. If not, it just sound funny for people to say things like "YES!! i can install 8 gigs of ram on my computer" meanwhile they max out at 942mb.... Or "i can't wait to get the 500gig internal HD" when they have 200 gigs for 2 years now and only have 54gigs used.

Thanks for the response 😉
 
billmister said:
lol. I come accross people like you EVERY day at work. The "know it all". The once who argue that they don't want 8gig iphone.. they want 3GIG iphone. etc... It provides humor really.

You should not really Assume. It doesn't look good for your part at ALL. In any case, My point is made. I do know what i talk about because i come around products like these EVERY DAY, and come accross "AVERAGE" "SERIOUS USERS" "PRO USERS" "TEENS" and "KNOW IT ALLS" ::cough cough::
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Buddy, you have NO idea. Too bad you wouldn't believe me even if I told you.
 
i'm posting this here because i can't find the other posting about the new macbook pros. my old macbookpro 2007 blew up (the video card issue) and after 'replacing' the logicboard twice and the clamshell once, they declared my laptop useless and offered me a brand new macbookpro. i took it, and it is nice. its a free upgrade, i suppose, but I HATE HATE HATE the glossy screen. luckily i will mostly be staring at my old 23 in cinema display most days. just for anyone who was wondering if it might be ok to deal with. NOPE. it stinks.
 
shen said:
remember though that OS X is a *nix and it can use RAM intelligently, unlike windows.
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FWIW, memory management under OS X is quite unique and does not work like Linux, or *BSD, even.

I find it quite odd that 8GB is not possible on the new macbooks when the hardware itself CAN support and does detect 8GB of ram. Seems like it is then a limitation of the OS itself on the Macbook hardware for some reason. Apple...?
 
.Chris said:
speaking of memory could you use any memory in a mac or does it need to be a certin kind?
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If you by kind, you mean brand, then no, it doesn't matter, but the kind, as in DDR2 or DDR3 does matter as the pins are different. And you are better off with the same speed RAM in all slots as the system will slow the RAM to the slowest speed, which I've seen cause problems even though it'll technically supposed to work.
 
Haha! Awesome!

Hey everyone, I'm a new MacRumors forum noob. I have actually been following the Macbook update for months on macrumors...I think either since Dec. or Feb., and I FINALLY got mine! I absolutely love it! It is so sexy. I got the one spec'd under the pro, like most people I suppose. Holy crap, though, after being such a hardcore Windows user, building my old PC and whatnot, I must say OSX is so awesome I don't know I could go back. The gestures are just so fluid, and natural. I find myself trying to do them on PC laptops and being disappointed.

But actually on this article's content, I think it is sweet that it can support up to 6! I should have a great run on my mac, and let me just say I am another proud switcher. 😀
 
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