System Center 2012 helps you manage your IT environments across datacenters, the cloud, client computers, and devices. Using these integrated and automated management capabilities, you can become a trusted service provider. System Center captures and aggregates knowledge about systems, policies, processes, and best practices so that you can optimize your infrastructure to reduce costs, improve application availability, and enhance service delivery.
Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager and System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection provide a unified infrastructure to manage and protect physical, virtual, and mobile client environments, helping:

• Empower users to be productive from anywhere, on whatever device they choose.
• Provide a unified infrastructure for client management and protection.
• Make it easier and faster to administer client systems and maintain system compliance.

System Requirements are dependent on the features installed.  Users can go to the following link to download instructions on what the hardware requirements are depending on the feature(s) they want to install:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg682077.aspx#BKMK_SupConfigSiteSystemReq

Minimum Hardware Requirements for Site Systems

This section identifies the minimum required hardware requirements for Configuration Manager site systems. These requirements are sufficient to support all features of Configuration Manager in an environment with up to 100 clients. This information is suitable for testing environments. For guidance about the recommended hardware for Configuration Manager in full-scale production environments, see Planning for Hardware Configurations for Configuration Manager.

The following minimum requirements apply to all site types (central administration site, primary site, secondary site) when you install all available site system roles on the site server computer.
 

Hardware component     

Processor

• Minimum: AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon 64, Intel Xeon with Intel EM64T support, Intel Pentium IV with EM64T support
• Minimum: 1.4 GHz

RAM

• Minimum: 2 GB

Free disk space

• Available: 10 GB
• Total: 50 GB

Configuration Manager Console Requirements

The Configuration Manager console is supported on the operating systems that are listed in the following table. Each computer that installs the Configuration Manager console requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.

It is supported to install the System Center 2012 Configuration Manager console on the same computer with the Configuration Manager 2007 console. However, you cannot use the System Center 2012 Configuration Manager console to manage Configuration Manager 2007 sites, and vice versa.