For stage 1 RAM is not an issue, for stage 2, the more the better, though the impact gets smaller the more you have.
I have a theory that running two copies of prime95/mprime on a dualcore/hyperthreaded machine gives not twice the speed, but a little more nevertheless.
So I once tried to figure out how to let one instance of prime95 run stage 1, (the command with B1=B2), and the other one stage 2, with lots of Ram. The idea was to have the time for stage 1 a little less than the time for stage 2, so that the first instance is always a bit ahead, and have the savefiles in one shared directory.
There are commands for the prime.ini etc. to specify the work directory, but I got stuck somehow and never got it working. If somebody else has some spare time to figure things out, it may work though.
H.