Thinkpads Forum

Lenovo is not announcing a 2GB DIMM for T60 until later this year....does anyone know of a 3rd party company that makes a 2GB today?

Crucial has some 2GB modules (CT517026) for $695.99.

I would be interested in knowing if anything has actually done the 4gb upgrade. For the performance increase the cost seems high.

Leeper wrote:I would be interested in knowing if anything has actually done the 4gb upgrade. For the performance increase the cost seems high.

Actually, 3GB is the highest you can go for 32 bit systems.

pphilipko wrote:Actually, 3GB is the highest you can go for 32 bit systems.

Sorry, but that is wrong. There is no inherent 3Gb limit on 32bit systems. Nor is there such a limit to Windows (as is often falsely reported). In fact, depending on the motherboard, a 32bit systems could (at least theoretically) be able to address as much as 64Gb of physical memory.

This point has been discussed at length in many threads in this forum. See:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=20186
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=19012
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=21730
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=21389
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=21025

And especially see this article:

http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/2 ... s3gbenough

The long and the short of it is, it depends on the motherboard. The Intel chipset shipped in the T60 should handle 4Gb RAM, but Lenovo has reported otherwise in some (not all) of it's specifications. So we probably won't know if 4Gb is going to work until somebody tries it.

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As far as getting a decent priced 2Gb stick goes, I think people will have to wait. The Crucial stick was priced at $300 before it was released. Then when it actually came out the price shot up to $1500, but dropped to the current $700 price within a couple weeks. I think it will probably hit the $300 mark in a few months, at which point it will be half-way reasonable.

There is a SmartModular 2Gb stick for about $300 that lists as "Genearlly In Stock." If you do a Froogle search for "2gb sodimm" you'll find it. It's being sold as a module for Macs. Not sure what "Generally In Stock" means, although that is a change in availability status from "Call" so maybe it is shipping now. I don't know anything about SmartModular as a RAM source. I tried to research them a bunch a while ago and couldn't find anything out.

No, it is 4Gb of physical memory.

Each bits can be either 0 or 1 (equals 2 solutions). With actual 32bits CPU, we have 2^32 = 4294967296 bits = 4Gb of memory directly addressable by the CPU.

that's the limitation of the 32bits architecture. There's no way for the CPU to adress more.
Motherboards can maybe adress more, but not the CPU. Having motherboards with more than 4Gb of RAM only means there is more than 1 CPU on the motherboard.

Kel Ghu wrote:No, it is 4Gb of physical memory.

Each bits can be either 0 or 1 (equals 2 solutions). With actual 32bits CPU, we have 2^32 = 4294967296 bits = 4Gb of memory directly addressable by the CPU.

that's the limitation of the 32bits architecture. There's no way for the CPU to adress more.
Motherboards can maybe adress more, but not the CPU. Having motherboards with more than 4Gb of RAM only means there is more than 1 CPU on the motherboard.

Yes, this is what I was saying earlier. Although I don't know why you are talking about more than 4GB, I don't remember anyone arguing that more than 4GB was possible, naturally its not for the reasons you explained.

I could accept that it is a BIOS issue, because that has nothing to do with address space. But now we're hearing it is not, which is good, because it shouldn't be. In the year 2006 any machine should be loadable with 4GB of physical ram. The 3GB is a missunderstanding from the PAE world and has to do with extending address space for user processes, such as giving a SQL server more memory on a 32bit architecture.

Kel Ghu wrote:No, it is 4Gb of physical memory.

Each bits can be either 0 or 1 (equals 2 solutions). With actual 32bits CPU, we have 2^32 = 4294967296 bits = 4Gb of memory directly addressable by the CPU.

that's the limitation of the 32bits architecture. There's no way for the CPU to adress more.
Motherboards can maybe adress more, but not the CPU. Having motherboards with more than 4Gb of RAM only means there is more than 1 CPU on the motherboard.

I don't think that's right. Please, again, read this article:

http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/2 ... s3gbenough

The article explains:

"Contrary to popular belief, Intel's 32-bit CPUs have more than 32 address pins. They actually have 36, giving them the ability to address a 64GB physical address space."

And:

"Since Pentiums can address 64GB of physical address space, there's no problem with this 32 bit processor addressing stuff that requires 33 bits to reach."

The issue, for us T60 users, or anyone else, is whether or not their motherboard accomodates the extra pins on the processor.

oh ok. It's right. I remember I heard smth about 36bits... Thanks educating me

Someone should try putting 4Gb then

Right 36bit is possible with PAE but you should know that memory from 4GB up to whatever you haver will dead slow (yes, really).

So, except in certain server when capacity is better than speed, really 32bits CPU have 4GB limits, period. If you wanna have speed of s**t slower than with less than 4GB, ok, your problem...

thibouille27 wrote:Right 36bit is possible with PAE but you should know that memory from 4GB up to whatever you haver will dead slow (yes, really).

So, except in certain server when capacity is better than speed, really 32bits CPU have 4GB limits, period. If you wanna have speed of s**t slower than with less than 4GB, ok, your problem...

Why do the goal posts of this topic keep being moved. Nobody cares about having more than 4GB, they care about having all 4 GB.

This continual talk of more than 4GB is confusing the issues.