4 ms·

>It's wild to think that Intel was looking at 4GB and saying, "This probably isn't going to be enough." Not really. While consumers at home had 8MB, Intel was

>It's wild to think that Intel was looking at 4GB and saying, "This probably isn't going to be enough." Not really. While consumers at home had 8MB, Intel was already looking to compete with PowerPC, DEC Alpha, MIPS systems where 4GB wasn't really out of the ordinary, so they knew where things were going.

LukeShu 2y ago
As far as I know, there were only 5 PPro computers that could take >4GB: Axil Northbridge NX801, Data General AV8600, HP NetServer LXr Pro8, NCR Worldmark 4380, or Unisys XR/6 Interestingly, while the Intel 450GX chipset was designed to daisy-chain DRAM controllers (1 controller chip per 4GB of RAM), none of the boards that actually could take >4GB used that, instead building their own solutions. Presumably that meant that there was a bug in the chipset. Anyway, each of those 5 computers would have run you at least $500k in 1998. (I've been on-and-off trying to acquire one of those boxes for a few years now.)
- trentnelson 2y ago
  Had fun googling those system names. NX801: https://www.tpc.org/results/individual_results/axil/axil.nx801.es.pdf https://www.tpc.org/results/individual_results/axil/axil.nx8... 200 9.1GB SCSI disks for 1.8TB! And still only 4GB RAM on that SQL Server 6.5 box they used for TPC-C. Wild. And yeah, $770k for that server. Edit: I guess whilst I'm at it... Data General AV8600: https://www.tpc.org/results/individual_results/dg/dg.8600.es.pdf https://www.tpc.org/results/individual_results/dg/dg.8600.es... HP NetServer LXr Pro8: https://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/hp/netserverlxrpor8.pdf https://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/hp/netserverlxrpor8.pdf