mrklaw said: ram is probably just working space for downloads and connecting to the PSN etc. I wonder if it has its own little embedded OS? Guess it must have. Click to expand...

mrklaw said: yeah. Its kind of a nuts amount though - same ram as PS3 (not including the VRAM) just for a background processor. Click to expand...

Yeah, it must. The complications of having to pass control of the system back and forth between the background processor's OS and the main OS are probably why we don't have game suspension at launch.Well, there's a few ways to think about it. It's enough that they can buffer downloads and only spin up the drive occasionally to burst write the data, keeping noise and power use as low as possible. And they have to think about what the price and availability of this kind and capacity of RAM will be for the life of the product. With both the PS1 and PS2 they discontinued manufacturing when it got to the point that the parts they needed were so obsolete the prices they'd have to pay to get them made became prohibitive. a 64MB DDR3 chip might have been adequate for their needs today, and cheap, too, but what happens in 5 years when no one mass produces DDR3 in that density anymore?