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Unibody Macbook Pro Ram
- Thread starter waloshin
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According to that article you're probably referring to, there is a wall on the OS at 4GB max. Who knows if Snow leopard will unlock this, but I hope not. Don't wanna spend $500~ for a 4GB module. 
According to that article you're probably referring to, there is a wall on the OS at 4GB max. Who knows if Snow leopard will unlock this, but I hope not. Don't wanna spend $500~ for a 4GB module.
So true!
Actually, UNtrue. Read the Barefeats artical (here) it does see and use 6gigs. Also, people who say the OS can only see 4gigs or less are just silly. Remember, my 4+ year old Powermac G5 can see at least 8gigs, and today's (and yesterday's) Mac Pro's can use 32gigs of ram. Leopard has no problem seeing the ram. I think it's still up for debate exactly why the early and late 08 mbp's don't use all 8gigs, but it isn't an inherent OS X thing.
Well, we know that OS X on a MacPro and PowerMac's can see the RAM, but they have different chipset hardware, this chipset is capable as per nVidia of using 8GB of RAM, but it's something Apple has set up that makes it incapable of using so much, the issue is then what did they do? Why does the OS behave in that fashion when on other machines with even higher amounts of RAM it works fine? Is it in their EFI/Firmware/BIOS? or is it something in OS X that prohibits these machines from working correctly?
I wonder if Vista x64 or XP x64 in BootCamp would see 8GB of RAM correctly, that'd tell us if it's a firmware or OS limitation apple has in place, or even if it's intentional or not.
That's why I said it was debatable. There are some really long threads about people trying to figure out the reason for the limitation (mostly in earlier mbp's), but I don't think anyone was able to say definitively.
Leopard sees the ram just find, but not using it at all is a whole other problem. The article you posted even they agreed that more then 4GB actually slowed down you're computer. They used the term "molasses mode". This is the same conclusion as the ifixit article posted on MacRumors a bit earlier. Here
with 8gb, but not 6gb, 6gb ran fine, which is weird.
it's 64-bit underpinnings allow it to dynamically address more than 3.3gb of ram, and 8gb is well WELL beneath the limit of a 64-bit os, the problem is there seems to be something else benefiting to this issue, seeing as nvidia states that the chipset is fully capable of 8gb ram.