Mindblowing Fact: You can configure a Mac Pro with more RAM than every NES ever made

This was too good not to share. Twitter user Chris Mallinson has done the maths and it turns out that the Mac Pro (the super powerful Mac aimed at TV editors and record producers), can be configured to have more RAM available than every Nintendo Entertainment System ever produced.

It checks out too – though the maths is a little fiddly.

There were 61.91 million NES sold throughout the lifetime of the console.

The NES has 2 KiB of RAM – that’s 2 Kibibytes (like 2 Kilobytes but a KB is technically 1000 bytes whereas a KiB is 1024 – a crucial difference when multiplying!)

So that makes 123820000 KiB. Or to make more understandable, that’s 118.084GB of RAM in every NES ever made.

But what about the Mac Pro? The new Mac Pro which has just been announced – like the 2010 model can only officially go up to 64GB of RAM – if you walk into an Apple store and want to buy one.

However, if you’re willing to take your computer apart, you can manually add in extra RAM to double this to 128GB. In fact – the recently released Mac OS Mavericks operating system is the first Apple OS to properly support 128GB – as the folks at the Mac Performance Guide figured out:

So there we have it – the new Mac Pro can run about 10GB more RAM than all 60 million NES.

And technology has managed to do that in just 30 years! Now all we need to see is a video of Mario running on an emulator on the Mac Pro for the circle to be complete.