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OT: Like you mentioned PAE was introduced with the Pentium Pro in '95. That was the same year my family got its first PC, with a whopping 8MB of RAM. It's wild to think that Intel was looking at 4GB and saying, "This probably isn't going to be enough."

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>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.

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.)

Had fun googling those system names. NX801: 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...

HP NetServer LXr Pro8: https://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/hp/netserverlxrpor8.pdf

Where I worked back in 1995, we had DEC Alpha workstations running Windows NT processing what were then huge images. We had DEC workstations running 4 GB of RAM.

I think some Alpha systems had 8 GB installed even back then.

The Alpha was 64 bit native but Windows NT was still 32 bit so I think you needed VMS if you wanted more than 4 GB. A 64 bit version of Windows 2000 for Alpha was created but never released ( this was the first 64 bit Windows ).

It was not totally impossible to see beyond 4 GB of RAM.

at the time the original xbox was designed and its same generation of intel CPUs, the absolute practical maximum you would be able to put into a single socket desktop motherboard would be 768MB of PC100 or PC133 SDRAM (3 x 256MB DIMMs). If you actually saw a system with 768MB of RAM in it, that would be some very high-end CAD workstation.

There was no practical way to get anywhere near 4GB of RAM within the dollar cost that a person purchasing a $200 CPU on a $150 motherboard would be able to bear.

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