Though system's final specification remains undisclosed
The PlayStation Vita’s memory capacity has not been subject of any reduction, a Sony Japan source has told Develop.
Yet a senior, well-placed person would not divulge what the system’s memory capacity would be when the handheld ships.
That means the final product could still be running with 256MB internal memory, though this is not certain either.
When the PS Vita was announced, it was rumoured – though not confirmed – that the system featured 512MB of memory.
One theory is that, when the development kits began arriving at studios, the 256MB of available RAM suggested Sony had cut the system specs.
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But if the handheld ships with 256MB RAM, technically that would not represent a cut because the initial spec was never announced.
Another theory is that the machine has always had 512MB of system memory, and that the RAM cut rumours were false.
When asked if PS Vita’s memory had been halved, Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida said: “Do not believe everything you read on the Internet.”
But the lines of information have been confused further by one PS Vita developer, Novarama’s Dani Sanchez-Crespo, who claimed that a reduction in RAM would not affect the studio’s output.
He now claims he did not know if the handheld’s memory has been reduced.
As opposed to many other tech sectors, game hardware specifications are typically drip-fed before a console is announced, due in part to the many iterations the hardware can go through. This benefits the system owners because they can tailor systems to trends in the market.
Sony recently insisted that PS Vita will be the company’s most developer-friendly system to date.
I think the rumours were probably BS all along.
One thing everyone fails to note when talking about slashing the memory to save on unit price is that the memory density of the ram has no bearing on its price.
Memory prices are almost entirely driven by supply and demand.
In the current market smaller density modules are actually more expensive than larger ones, so slashing the memory would increase the cost of the platform.
Everybody seems to not notice that the very words said by Yoshida were "Do not believe everything you read on the internet" and he may well have been talking about the rumours of the RAM being halved. But could that sentence not just have easily meant don't believe in the rumours of 512MB of RAM?
