[Oberon] RAM capacity for Oberon

[Skulski, Wojciech]

Chris and Joerg:

Time to change topic? This is hardly CONST.

Chris wrote:  haven't yet found any use for the additional 1 MB ;-)

Joerg wrote: for embedded (head-less) systems I might agree. If you want to have a decent graphic resolution in color, you‘ll be happy to have more RAM😊

> 1024x768x2 colors = 96 KB (9% of 1MB)
> 800x600x16 colors = 234 KB (22% of 1MB)
> 1024x768x256 colors = 768 KB (75% of 1MB)

It all depends on the application. A headless controller executing a proportional - integral - differential (PID) algorithm needs very little RAM. A similar controller executing a typical nuclear physics application may need more RAM. Just to explain, a typical nuclear physics DAQ system may want to perform online 2D histogramming of physics quantities such as energy_1 versus energy_2, or time-of-flight versus energy. A decent 2D histogram will be 512x512 of 32 bit words. A single histogram will thus occupy an entire megabyte. A reasonable multichannel DAQ will need space for several such histograms simultaneously. The needed memory grows very quickly with added features.

It may be interesting to compare memory price per megabyte, based on low volume DigiKey pricing. the numbers are typical. The capacities are also typical. prices may fluctuate a bit.

Mem type  capacity  $/MB
ASRAM   1 or MB    $12
ZBT     2 or 4 MB    $9
CRAM    16      $0.33
HRAM    16      $0.40
SDRAM   32 or 64   $0.18
LPDDR   128      $0.06
DDR3L   256    $0.02

CRAM = Cellular RAM
HRAM = HyperRAM

Wojtek