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MacBook and Snow Leopard

JLUGO35

JLUGO35

Guest
Original poster
Jul 14, 2009
78
0
Inman/Columbia, South Carolina
Hello everyone. I was thinking about purchasing a MacBook with the money I saved up and upgrading the ram a few months later. I read that it only supports up to 4 gigs of ram. I also found that some of the older MacBooks can support up to 6 gigs of ram but have not found any info on the current model Apple sells. My question is can the new white MacBooks support over 4 gigs of ram, if not is this a hardware or software issue? If it is a software issue will it be solved by installing Snow Leopard since it can support 16 terabytes of ram? Thanks
 
Seems to be a firmware issue more than anything else, or possibly an artificial software limitation as the OS knows what hardware it's being installed on.

We'll find out when SL launches, unless some devs have dabbled with this issue, but I haven't heard anything of that sort yet.
 
It is a chipset issue. If your chipset is the pre Nvidia one, then it'll only support a max of 4 gb. If the chipset is Nvidia, it will support 8 gigs. However, there is a second issue of Apple blocking additions with firmware. So it's a mix of both.
 
megamanbnmaster said:
It is a chipset issue. If your chipset is the pre Nvidia one, then it'll only support a max of 4 gb. If the chipset is Nvidia, it will support 8 gigs. However, there is a second issue of Apple blocking additions with firmware. So it's a mix of both.
Click to expand...

I will be buying it during NC's tax free weekend so it will have the Nvidia 9400 chipset I believe.
 
JLUGO35 said:
My question is can the new white MacBooks support over 4 gigs of ram, if not is this a hardware or software issue? If it is a software issue will it be solved by installing Snow Leopard since it can support 16 terabytes of ram? Thanks
Click to expand...

Leopard (10.5) can already support 32GB of RAM. It's only individual applications that are limited to accessing 4GB of RAM, since they are 32-bit. 32-bit essentially means that the application only has the ability to address 2^32 bytes of memory, hence the 4GB limit. Snow Leopard will include support for 16TB of physical RAM, and individual 64-bit applications will effectively have support for unlimited (ok...16 billion GB) RAM.

Any current limit below 32GB is hardware or firmware based.
 
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