Random Access Memory (RAM)

Before I get into other apps every system should have, I just wanted to add this piece of information as a result of a demo I witnessed the other day by the techies at Kingston Technology.

Kingston is the largest independent fabricator of system memory modules (RAM). You might be familiar with internal/external disc drives, USBs or memory cards (SD, SDHC, etc.) from other fabricators like SanDisk. They are not the same thing.

At the very beginning of this blog I said, "You can never have enough RAM." The reason is simple: new applications requiere ever increasing amounts of RAM to function properly. Even if can't use all your RAM capacity now, sooner or later, you'll need it.

RAM is volatile memory. It's not meant to store anything; when you turn off your computer, everything you have in RAM is lost. It's a temporary workspace applications use to access frequently used data.


Having said that, the other day the nice people of Kingston performed a demo of their latest RAM module: HyperX DDR3. RAM, like every other technology, has evolved. The very first computers (IBM PC, Apple IIe, Amiga) had 8-16KB RAM, a far cry from the 8GB systems of today. However, today's memory modules are not backward compatible with previous versions. In other words, DDR1 is not compatible with DDR2 which is not compatible with DDR3.

The first thing you notice about the new HyperX is its heat dissipator. It's huge! And that can only mean one thing: it generates a lot of heat. But that's not a bad thing because that also means it's fast. In fact, the whole demo centered around HyperX's capacity for overclocking. In plain English, the user's choice to configure data transfer between RAM and application faster and beyond its intended limits. Techies do this with resource-hungry video games to minimize or eliminate frame by frame latency and is configured from the system's BIOS. What this all boils down to is: if it's capable of seamlessly handling the most resource-hungry video games, it's capable of handling even your most demanding mission critical applications.

I can't give you all the technical details of how RAM works or the specs of HyperX, but Kingston's website does a good job of explaining the development and evolution of RAM modules with this Ultimate Memory Guide.