ram limited by software or hardware

[akira2501]

Just wondering. Would it be possible to upgrade the ram on a macbook pro to 8 or 12 gigs with the advent of snow leopard, or is that set by the hardware of the ram slots themselves?

Thnx

 

[J the Ninja]

I believe it's an issue of the chipset memory controller not supporting more than 4GB

 

[Schtumple]

Hardware, simple as, its the chipset that cannot handle amounts higher than stated, you could put in the 8gb as you said, but as soon as a application/combo of applications use more than 4gb, the system will crash.

 

[t0mat0]

Well, we haven't seen the Configs of the next generation of MBP yet, have we!
It would be constrained by physical dimensions and the amount of RAM you could put on a DIMM, and also how many slots there were able to be put into a laptop. Price would also come into the equation. With 6GB a DIMM being made now, you could be looking at 12GB presumably. The OS could take more. The chipset it seems would also limit the higher amount, however, it's likely to change in the upcoming 10 months. They'd be on Nehalem by then presumably and be looking at a potential route to Calpella.

 

[raymondu999]

Really, up to this point in time, any MacBook Pro that is at least July 2007 release (Santa Rosa) should be able to support up to 8GB. However, currently this is software-limited to 4GB. Hence, right now we can only speculate as to how much RAM will be allowed by the systems running on Snow Leopard.

 

[OllyW]

From the MacRumors guide to understanding Intel Mac RAM

4 GB SODIMMs (if you could find any) will not work in any Mac to date. 4 GB SODIMMs are (mid 2008) horrendously expensive. A few brave souls have tested them and while a single 4 GB may work, two 4 GB modules crashed the machine as soon as the OS tried to access more than 4096 MB of memory.