Recently I was planning to checkout SharePoint 2013 and do a test drive. So to get a virtual machine from our internal cloud hosting I was doing analysis on the hardware requirements for SharePoint 2013 preview and the following came as a shock !
24GB RAM for 2013 preview development server as compared to 4GB for 2010 version.
That’s 6 times of 2010 RAM requirements. I am hoping that the requirements will come down once the SharePoint 2013 goes to RTM.
Hardware requirements—web servers, application servers, and single server installations
| Installation Scenario | Deployment type and scale | RAM | Processor | Hard disk space |
| Single server with a built-in database or single server that uses SQL Server | Development or evaluation installation of SharePoint Foundation 2013 Preview | 8 GB | 64-bit, 4 cores | 80 GB for system drive |
| Single server with a built-in database or single server that uses SQL Server | Development or evaluation installation of SharePoint Server 2013 Preview | 24 GB | 64-bit, 4 cores | 80 GB for system drive |
| Web server or application server in a three-tier farm | Pilot, user acceptance test, or production deployment of SharePoint Server 2013 Preview | 12 GB | 64-bit, 4 cores | 80 GB for system drive |
Hardware requirements—database servers
| Component | Minimum requirement |
| Processor |
|
| RAM |
For large deployments, see the “Estimate memory requirements” section in Storage and SQL Server capacity planning and configuration (SharePoint Server 2010). These values are larger than those recommended as the minimum values for SQL Server because of the distribution of data that is required for a SharePoint 2013 Preview environment. For more information about SQL Server system requirements, see Hardware and Software Requirements for Installing SQL Server 2008 R2. |
| Hard disk | 80 GB for system drive Hard disk space depends on how much content that you have in your deployment. For information about how to estimate the amount of content and other databases for your deployment, see Storage and SQL Server capacity planning and configuration (SharePoint Server 2010). |
Source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(v=office.15).aspx#hwforwebserver