Hugh RAM usage on fresh restart

[OngL]

I have just upgraded from MBP 2008 Unibody running 10.6.7 to MBP 2011 running the exact 10.6.7. The issue that I had is that upon a fresh restart, I see significant increase of RAM usage between the two.

iStat is installed in both laptops and upon fresh restart MBP 2008 has about 930 MB on some boot-ups and 1.05 GB RAM on others. For MBP 2011, the RAM usage is between 1.3 GB to 1.4 GB RAM. Both has similar start-up application e.g. dropbox, istat, growl and standard apps.

All I can identify is that the built-in graphics shared memory between 2008 and 2011 is different by 128 MB (256 vs 384 MB), however, the RAm differences between the two after boo is about 400-500 MBs.

Is there a good explanation for this? I mean the OS is the same, the hardware shouldn't impact the RAM usage that much, should it?

 

[marc11]

Compare the apps and app memory usage in Activity Monitor between the two, that will tell you where the extra ram is going.

 

[OngL]

Compare the apps and app memory usage in Activity Monitor between the two, that will tell you where the extra ram is going.

Did that but doesn't seems apple-to-apple despite both are Intel and runs on 10.6.7. The kernel task and windows server processes has different size on both (significantly). So can't be comparing this way.

 

[mulo]

the integrated graphics card uses the system ram as Vram, and uses 387MB at minimum. so theres part of it.
it al has to do with hardware.

 

[OngL]

the integrated graphics card uses the system ram as Vram, and uses 387MB at minimum. so theres part of it.
it al has to do with hardware.

Yes, I have taken this into consideration that the new MBP has 128 MB more tham than older MBP, still doesn't explain the 200-300 MB missing after offsetting the 128 MB.

You wrote minimum 387 MB, does it go higher than that? I thought max is 385 MB?