Diminishing Return on RAM

July 1996 / Inbox / Diminishing Return on RAM

In "120-MHz Pentium Power for Under $400" (April News & Views), you make several references to Intel's claims that processor upgrades deliver significantly better performance than RAM upgrades. Unless you are describing a trivial case, the same processes with the same memory requirements will see a marked improvement with the addition of RAM. The val ue of adding a new CPU is diminished by the fact that the real bottleneck is not CPU cycles; it is usually disk access. Adding RAM almost always helps relieve this bottleneck.
Sharif Abdallah
Cincinnati, OH
sharif@ibm.net

Adding RAM, especially to 2- or 4-MB systems, can improve performance. However, if you already have a lot of memory--e.g., 8 MB in a system running applications like Quicken--you reac h a point of diminishing returns. --Dave Andrews, news editor

Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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