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As the pentium 3 used the chipset for the memory controller, it's likely limited by that, though you'll likely struggle to find specs at that sort of level publ
by kimixa 2y ago
As the pentium 3 used the chipset for the memory controller, it's likely limited by that, though you'll likely struggle to find specs at that sort of level publicly available. Though assuming it's the same as contemporary consumer nForce chipsets may be a good assumption [0], which may be where the 1.5gb limit discussed came from.
And the p3 also supported PAE [1], so technically could address more than 4gb of ram. Though software support may be lacking - I think on the original xbox the app ran in ring0 so did things like page table management itself, rather than the "OS", so would likely require significant per-game modifications.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_nForce_chipsets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_nForce_ch...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
- Cieric 2y agoTrue, I didn't know PAE was a thing till now. I figured something like that was possible, I just didn't know we had it around the time of the xbox. I guess that raises the current theoretical limit to around 64GiB? And yeah even the chip presented in the video was also noted that even 256mb wouldn't provide any benefits to games, only to homebrew or game mods and even that was overkill for anything that currently exists. Thanks for the info, I'm going to look more into it later and see if I can come up with anything more concrete.
- userbinator 2y agoyou'll likely struggle to find specs at that sort of level publicly available Intel was far more open at that time (up through the Pentium IV era); here's the datasheet for the PIII: https://download.intel.com/design/PentiumIII/datashts/24526408.pdf https://download.intel.com/design/PentiumIII/datashts/245264... ...and yes, it does expose all 36 address bits on the FSB. The FSB protocol is actually the same as the one first used by the P6.