[CentOS] PXE vmlinuz kernel doesn't recognize memory in Intel NUC?

Hello all!  I'm hoping someone can help.  I'm having 2 issues; first:

When trying to load a CentOS LiveCD via PXE on an Intel NUC (NUC6CAY), I
get:
"Not enough memory to load specified image".  The image is 1.1 gigs, and
there is 16 gigs of memory in the NUC.

To combat this, I found this forum post
<https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1398> which suggested using
the "mem=" kernel parameter to manually set it.

The next problem I get is one of two things:

On a normal working system, I get the dots loading in PXE, then it freezes
on "ready." forever
On the NUC, I get a sqaushfs crash saying that the image is unusable.

My questions are:

Has anyone successfully used the "mem=" parameter in a PXE environment?
I wasn't even aware that drivers were necessary for a kernel image to read
RAM; I'd thought this was something that was just inherent.  Does the
CentOS PXE kernel need to be updated?