I know somebody will mark this as duplicate, but I can't find the answer, so I'm asking. I have 3GB of RAM and Ubuntu says: Memory 2.9 GiB. No, it is NOT my onboard graphics card, because it uses only ONE GiB of RAM.
1 Answer
1GB (1 Gigabyte = 1'000 MB) and 1GiB (1 Gibibyte = 1'024 MiB) aren't the same thing.
You say that you should have 3GB of RAM and the Graphics chip uses 1 GiB.
I assume you have a total of 4GB RAM, of which 1GiB is dedicated the Graphics chip. And what's the result of 4GB-1GiB? That's correct: 2.9GB or 2.73GiB.
I've got the slight feeling that even memory manufacturers don't know the difference between those two unit systems (or they deliberately fool the customers and use them interchangably, so your 4GiB memory actulally only is 4GB, which is 3.72GiB) That Ubuntu says 2.9GiB doesn't sound correct to me. Frontends and their system utils don't always 100%ly match...
So you see, it's always a fuss about those two unit systems. Better not think about it and accept it or you'll end up with a terrible headache...
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1+1 you beat me to this answer. An auto calculator and chart can be found here if the OP, or anyone else, wants more info.... wintelguy.com/gb2gib.html Dec 30, 2014 at 20:50
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1This needs a little more digging; HD manufacturers tend to go by GB, but RAM manufacturers go by GiB (from Wikipedia). I agree the difference is probably negligible, but I'm not positive this is the correct answer. Dec 30, 2014 at 20:54
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Indeed, only HD manufacturers use powers of 10, ram is in powers of 2, so 4 GB of ram is 4 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes.– psusiDec 31, 2014 at 3:38
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1RAM has always been in powers of 2. Google "GB RAM" and you'll find multiple listings of modules as containing 1024 Megabytes; in fact, megabyte originally referred to 1024 * 1024 bytes, and it was false advertising by hard disk makers that brought up the need to distinguish between MB and MiB. Dec 31, 2014 at 11:18
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1@ZeissIkon, to be fair, floppy makers also screwed it up, adding to the confusion. 720k disks were 720 KiB, but when they doubled the density to 1440 KiB, they mislabeled them as 1.44 MB, which isn't correct using either base 2 or base 10.– psusiDec 31, 2014 at 14:54
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