A serious question on mobile hardware

[GHxC]

Do modern smartphones use dedicated video memory?

This just popped into my head. No one ever speaks about phone ram speeds. Because I'm pretty sure phones have the cpu and the gpu on the same chip, like an apu. And since an apu uses system ram for graphics memory needs, wouldn't it be crucial (pun not intended) to have faster mobile ram?

All these corporate OEMs don't know that instead of telling people that more ram = better and cramming in huge amounts of ram into a mobile device, which it will never use, is stupid? Instead of doing that, why don't they work on bringing in faster memory? I'm sure it'll accelerate gaming performance on mobile. Discuss.

Unless of course I'm completely wrong, but I have a feeling I'm right here.

[DoubleY]

Well, AFAIK, you have to allocate SOME memory to a GPU, whether it's an iGPU or not.

[GHxC]

Yes but since it's integrated, wouldn't the memory just be allocated from the ram? Which again brings me to the point of why no one speaks of the speed of mobile ram. It should make a lot more difference than using a huge amount of ram. For crying out loud, some PCs have less ram than smartphones. It feels like their focusing innovation in the wrong direction here?

[ohJey]

I think at the moment it's more important to bump up the amount of RAM we have before we start worrying about speeds.  

plus, I don't see why we would need faster RAM when the CPUs and GPUs are still quite weak

[steffen_anywhere]

I think at the moment it's more important to bump up the amount of RAM we have before we start worrying about speeds.  

plus, I don't see why we would need faster RAM when the CPUs and GPUs are still quite weak

Yeah, my iPad has 1GB of RAM. Sharing a quarter of that with the GPU does not sound like a great idea. And 108GFLOPS is rather powerful for a mobile device...That is why I'd expect at least 256MB allocated to it.