Oh yeah, right, they ended up aiming to max the memory bandwidth as the bottleneck and allow both CPUs and GPUs to participate.
How is it though that ordinary folk who have machines with more than 6 gigs of RAM resist becoming botnet zombie machines?
Who is intended to mine this thing? Don't gamers have typically at least 8 gigs of RAM? Are gamers resistant to having their machines captured by botnets?
-MarkM-
Plenty of machines with 6-8GB fall victim to botnets.
But generally speaking, the more powerful your desktop, the more you will look after its well-being.
Assume a Proof-of-Work requires 7GB with constant random memory accesses. Unless you have strictly more than 8GB,
and 7GB freely available, this will send your computer into swap-hell as it constantly swaps pages to disk and back
(1GB is usually reserved for the OS and other basic stuff).
This will make your computer not just very slow, but totally unusable. You will take notice and find the offender.
Especially if you're a gamer...