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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials
AMAT 322.31-5.6%Jan 30 3:59 PM EST

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To: Ramsey Su who wrote (22691)8/9/1998 10:28:00 AM
From: Katherine Derbyshire  Read Replies (1) of 70976
 
Part of the confusion is because DRAMs are manufactured in units of megabits (1 bit = 1 binary digit, or 1 physical cell), but PC memory is sold in units of megabytes (1 byte = 1 machine word = 8 bits for PCs). So, a PC with 32 megabytes of main memory (about standard these days) uses 256 megabits of DRAMs (= 16 16M chips, or 4 64M chips)

So, 32 million 64M units is enough to equip
32 million PCs at 8mbytes each
8 million PCs at 32Mbytes each
2 million PCs at 128Mbytes each

I recently did some PC shopping, and the "standard" seems to be 32megabytes or so. That's enough for the "average" user--business applications and the Internet--so most systems probably aren't upgraded.

I wasn't able to find good data re: the fraction of DRAMs used for PCs versus other applications. PCs are the largest single application, but I don't think they consume a majority of the chips. Especially as memory has gotten cheaper, non-PC devices have gotten "smarter".

Katherine
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