We continue with the famous Nintendo Entertainment System, better known as NES Nintendo. Historically, this console sold nearly 62 million units, and while half of the memory addressing was in the cartridges, the hardware was equipped with 2 KB of RAM tied to your CPU. Two years after the NES came the Master system from SEGA to compete with it, with revolutionary hardware that incorporated not only 8 KB of RAM but also 16 KB of VRAM for video.
After this generation of consoles came two other of the most famous and best-selling, the SEGA Genesis (Mega Drive) which has sold over 35 million units and the Super NES from Nintendo which has sold over 49 million units. Contemporary of these two consoles it is also necessary to mention the Neo-Geo. The Mega Drive had 64 KB of RAM with an additional 64 KB of VRAM and, beware, 8 KB of RAM for audio, while the Super Nintendo had 128 KB of RAM and 64 KB of VRAM (the latter, also shared for audio). audio). The Neo-Geo had 64 KB of RAM with 84 KB of VRAM and 2 KB dedicated to audio.
We put aside the Sega 32X, the Mega-CD and other consoles whose sales were almost marginal to move on to Sega Saturn, released in 1994 and sold over 9 million units. This Japanese console already had 2 MB of RAM, 1.5 MB of graphics memory and 512 KB for sound… what a leap forward in terms of performance!
But the Saturn was also almost circumstantial since the same year (in fact, only 11 days later) the first one was launched. PlayStation from SONY, which sold 102.49 million units. Technically it was not much superior to the Saturn, since it actually had 2MB of RAM and 1MB of VRAM, but without a doubt the developers turned to this console and it was the key to their success (after all, consoles have become They sell for games, right?).
Three years after the first PlayStation came the nintendo64, which managed to sell almost 33 million units. This 64-bit console had 4MB of RAM (RDRAM) and could be expanded to 8MB with an Expansion Pak (that’s right, they called it that, “Pak”). Three more years later, the SEGA Dreamcast, and managed to sell just over 9 million units. It was equipped, eye on the data, with 16 MB of RAM, 8 MB of VRAM and an additional 2 MB for audio.
On March 4, 2000, what was undoubtedly the console that revolutionized the market arrived, the PlayStation 2which is currently still the best-selling console in history with more than 155 million units, and which had only 32 MB of RAM. A year later, the two Nintendo Gamecube
In November 2005, another of these consoles arrived and revolutionized the market, the Xbox 360 which managed to sell almost 86 million units, and which was equipped neither more nor less than 512 MB of GDDR3 memory at 700 MHz (plus another 10 MB eDRAM cache for the GPU). A year later came the PlayStation 3, another of the best-selling consoles with almost 87 million units, and which was equipped with 256 MB of RAM for the system and an additional 256 MB for video. Just 8 days after the PS3, Nintendo presented its famous Wiiwhich managed to sell more than 101 million units and was equipped with only 64MB of GDDR3 RAM.
We come to the year 2012, when the Wii U of Nintendo equipped with 2 GB of GDDR3 (note that from Wii to Wii U, the RAM of these consoles had increased by 32 times), but November 15, 2013 was another iconic moment in the industry because it was when SONY released its PlayStation 4
Just a week after the PS4, Microsoft released the Xbox Onea console that managed to reach 41 million units sold and was equipped with 8 GB DDR3 in its original model, which was expanded to 12 GB in the Xbox One X.
We’ve gone back in time to 2017, specifically March 3, when Nintendo launched its famous To changea portable console that has already sold more than 107 million units and is equipped with only 4GB LPDDR4 memory a 1.600MHz.
You already know what the next step is, right? Indeed, we must jump to November 2020, the date on which, two days apart, the Xbox series X|S and the PlayStation 5. Por ahora, las consoles de Microsoft han vendido unos 8 million de unidades, por 13.4 million de las consoles de SONY, si bien es cierto que los problems de stock, el precio y la escasez de materials primas han jugado un papel important en the sales.
But let’s come to what concerns us in this article, the RAM of the consoles: the Xbox Series X is equipped with 16 GB of memory in total (10 in 320 bits and 6 in 192 bits), while the Xbox Series S has 10 GB total. For its part, SONY’s PlayStation 5 has 16 GB of GDDR6 (256-bit) plus an additional 512 MB of DDR4 for background tasks.
You have already seen it: from the 128 bytes of RAM of the Atari 2600 to the 16 GB of current consoles, the amount of memory has multiplied a lot, although it is also true that 46 years have passed between them.