Nintendo 3DS Found to Only Have 128MB of RAM

Well what do we have here? A recent teardown at Chipworks of the Nintendo 3DS reveals some interesting information. According to them, the Nintendo 3DS only has 128MB of RAM. That’s one fourth of what the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play and iPhone 4 have (512MB) and one eighth of what most Android smartphones have (most are at least 1GB of RAM). In reality that’s quite a leap over the last-gen of gaming handhelds. By comparison, the DSi has 16MB of RAM and the PSP-3000 has 64MB of memory. By now, you should know that more RAM means more functions can be handled at once, so what gives? With the 3DS and NGP both sporting multitasking capabilities, you’d think more RAM would be beneficial right? Well, for the most part, it doesn’t mean much because the 3DS is a gaming machine first and as such, it will rarely be juggling a ton of tasks at once like you would on a smartphone. Although the teardown unveils that the 128MB RAM in the 3DS is twice as fast as most PC DDR2 memory, we’ll save judgment of that when we see how fast the 3DS’s upcoming web browser handles web pages over Wi-Fi.

 

Raymond Wong
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: 3DS (Nintendo), memory, Nintendo, ram