Is it better to have a lot of small RAM chips or less larger ones?

[Ren Heika]

So I’ve been looking back at the base model Xbox One and PS4 and noticed the Xbox One has slower RAM but it has 16 x 512MB chips compared to 8 x 1GB chips in the PS4. Which configuration is better? This is more of a curiosity thing.

[Fasauceome]

technically the increased amount of ram chips on the Xbox would allow for more bandwidth

[Guest]

For PCs you'd want the least amount, with at least 2 sticks. For consoles it really doesn't matter for a console you'd want to see what fps reviewers have gotten and the game selection.

[porina]

It'll take some more detail to work out. What is the effective number of channels? How is the rank or chips per channel configured? Then throw on top of that the speed...

[Jurrunio]

if other specs are the same then of course more chips is better, since each chip gets the same bandwidth. I dont know how many memory channels they're running though

[Kilrah]

Can't determine anything from chip count alone, need to see what chips they are, what bus width, what organization, what's the bus architecture of the system,...

[Fasauceome]

2 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

if other specs are the same then of course more chips is better, since each chip gets the same bandwidth. I dont know how many memory channels they're running though

well for consoles there are no memory channels, because they pool like a graphics card and then allocate dynamically

[Jurrunio]

1 minute ago, Fasauceome said:

well for consoles there are no memory channels, because they pool like a graphics card and then allocate dynamically

change "memory channel" to bus width then, they're interchangeable here.