>3GB of OS can be written to the SSD in under a second.
This makes a common mistake when talking about todays SSDs, as it implies everything would be a tidy sequential read/write. We don't live off of fast SSDs with no RAM because the fastest are still almost an order of magnitude slower on sequential than just plain old single channel DDR4 (Even DRAMless SSDs are kind of horrid), and that's without considering latency and random access speeds (the RA part!). Realistically you hit smaller files and less predictable access and cut your transfer rate down several times. So now how does 400MB/s for a mixed batch of files instead of 19200 sound, and add another order of magnitude in latency, it adds up when the OS is hitting it with millions of requests.
It's kind of just a truism that faster SSDs make OS paging less painful, but to run most of the OS and background apps off the SSD and keep loading/offloading them...I think that would at least cancel out how much faster the CPU would be for the OS speed, and I'm already impatient with the PS4 OS speed lol
>So much so that the idea of having an entire DDR4 controller just for supporting 4GB of OS RAM feels incredibly wasteful.
I mean, one of the great things of the 8th gen over the 7th was the ARM coprocessor allowing background updates and downloads, I assume the 9th will still have that, and if you have an ARM coprocessor it needs RAM...So, wasteful to have a tiny memory controller on the coprocessor? Needs it anyways
I thought most rumors were pointing to it having some DDR4 for the OS but none of us know, but I know which one would perform better for getting in and out of the OS, store, browser, etc. Plus 1GB in the main pool is less than we already allocate to the OS this gen, so that sounds instantly out.