what are the difference betw shared memory and dedicated memory?

Question

For purchasing pc, which one is better?
(pardon me if the terms I've used is wrong, coz I'm not a techincally inclined person..)thanks.

Answer 1

Some components that are integrated on the motherboard such as sound cards and video cards share the systems memory (RAM) to perform. This will only be a problem if you plan to do anything graphic intensive, such as gaming. Otherwise for general use these components sharing some of the system's memory is not a big deal. I would recommend getting no less than 512MB of RAM in a new PC, highly recommend 1GB or more. Especially with a PC running Windows Vista. Separate video cards that are not integrated on the motherboard mostly have their own dedicated memory. Hope this helps.

Answer 2

shared memory refers to a (typically) large block of random access memory that can be accessed by several different central processing units (CPUs) in a multiple-processor computer system.

A shared memory system is relatively easy to program since all processors share a single view of data and the communication between processors can be as fast as memory accesses to a same location.

Dedicated Memory is a configurable feature that can improve the performance of some software when running on advanced Intel processors: Pentium and Pentium Pro processors support this feature. If you configure dedicated memory on a processor that does not support this feature, it will have no effect. Dedicated Memory can improve performance of applications that create large shared memory segments using the shared memory primitives described in shmget(2), shmctl(2), and shmop(2).

Answer 3

Generally "Shared memory" is a portion of the main memory that is used by the video driver/video system. So if you get a machine with 512 meg ram and shared memory you only have the part of it that is not used for video available for programs.

Dedicated on the other hand leaves ALL the system memory available for programs and all the video memory available for video use. (Usually a better preformance for both.)

Answer 4

Look here.