4GB DDR2 memory modules are not exotic anymore, their prices have dropped from the sky-high level. Workstation modules with ECC support are still the most widespread products in this category, but you can also get this much memory for your desktop as well.

http://www.digit-life.com/articles3/...00-4gb-p1.html

During our tests of AMD Phenom X4 9850 we noticed that results in one of MATLAB benchmarks were many times worse than those of Phenom X3 8750. This led us to an interesting idea: what if we force MATLAB to use Intel's Math Kernel Library library with AMD Phenom? Test results were so interesting that we decided to publish them in a separate article.

http://www.digit-life.com/articles3/...matlab-p1.html