Intanium? blah....
Well, it would be better then what I have.
RAM is interesting. When I switched from Win98 to Linux I was shocked to see something (well not "shocked" but concerned).
Using Win98 I trained my self to have as little running as possible. I wanted to have as little used RAM as possible. So when I ran quake 1 (couldn't handle quake2) I'd get as much performance as possible. Then when it get up to about 60-80% usage when nothing was going on then I'd know it was time to reboot since the memory leaks have caught up to me. ( I had 96 Megs of RAM)
Then when I switched to linux. I did the same thing. I figured that I'd keep the install as minimal as possible. No more memory leaks for me, no-sir-yee.
So after using it for a bit, I quit out of X and turned everything off and looked at RAM usage. 80% usage. WTF?
I looked up all the proccesses listed as running and all them seem to be needed, but still it was running at 70% usage.
Well I looked it up and learned something interesting things about RAM.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM.
Memory leaks like what win98 suffered from was something else, this was just crap built up in RAM that couldn't be used for anything and win98 was to stupid to delete.
Each program you use, a large part of it is based on libraries and programs that are used by a bunch of other programs.
Why should the OS delete that out of RAM since the next program you use you will just have to load it up again?
Then why should it remove ANYTHING from RAM? Well because if you run out RAM then there will be no more space for anything else, of course (which is what happens in win9x then they crash.)
So, the BEST thing to do is to load everything and keep it there until you need the space, then just write over it, right? Usually. BUT:
Some applications use streaming data. Like a music file, you read it once and then it goes away until you play that song. So you don't need to keep that stuff up in RAM and you should remove it as quickly as possible so that you can have the space for something more imporant and you don't overwrite something that may be needed in the next millasecond.
However the computer can't just automagicly tell what bit of memory is from a music file or a program file or a library. It's all just ones and zeros. NO way to tell reliably unless the programmer of the program that uses it was smart enough to have a way to go: "Save this bit I'll need it later" or "Use this once and remove it". Which also would have the side effect of making that program harder to port and use on different OSes and stuff. So you want to keep as much of that in the kernel as possible to make the job simpler for programmers to make fast programs.
So you have memory managment. One way that a kernel (just for illistration purposes) does it is to assign a value to a a block of RAM.
Maybe a number "5" for instance. So that each 10 clock ticks it may go down one number in value. Tick 5, tick 4, tick 3.... ect. So that when it hits 0 then it can automaticly be written over if you need more space. However if the computer reads from that block of RAM then it resets it back up to 5, and then count starts over.
That way often-used parts get kept and unused parts get marked to be overwritten.
then you could create a simple command that a programmer can use that says: When you use this give it a value of zero. So that a clever programmer can help out a kernel to be efficient, but then can be easily ported to another OS using a different memory managment sceme were that means something similar, but different, or just ignored altogether.
There are lots off different tricks and algorithms designers use to create good memory managment scemes. Maybe you could make the blocks of RAM smaller for more fine control, but that would increase overhead. Or maybe add 2 or 3 different numbers to represent different values, which may increase performance or make it easier or harder for programmers or make more overhead or whatever. And a bunch of other stuff that is way over my head.
Win9x doesn't realy do any of those things. It was designed to run on as little RAM as possible. So probably it's memory management is closer to "GET THE F* OUT OF MY RAM IF I DON'T NEED YOU RIGHT NOW, sure go and hang out in the swap file if you must". So fundamentally win98 CAN use more ram then 512Megs, but can it properly utilize it? Nope.
Can it properly utilize other parts (fast CPU, memory bandwidth, high speed disks, and fast vid cards) of a high-performance computer as much as a modern OS? Nope. Win95 (between memory leaks and reboots) may scream on a 80MHZ machine with 16 megs of RAM were WinXP or Linux would run like a dog thru deep mud with it's legs cut off, but it doesn't mean that Win95 is faster on a 2.0Ghz machine with 1536 Megs of RAM. It would probably be quite a bit slower then a stripped down Linux or WinXP setup. The same thing with win98 or winME, or Linux kernels 1.whatever or 2.0 or even 2.2.