RAM in computers vs phones

[Kartik Chopra]

Just curious,

When you buy a mid spec laptop it generally comes with 4-8 gb RAM, which is usually sufficient,

 

but now a days phones have started coming with 6-8 gb RAM, there is even news about one packed with 10 gb,

 

Why is this so ? Do phones need more RAM in general, or are laptops under speced (they do not seem like), and do we actually need 8 gb RAM in phones ?

[dragoon20005]

just like PC we play games on the phone and those game are almost have PS2/3 to Xbox one like Graphics

 

so yes

 

the RAM may be heavily used to load textures as the inbuild GPU do not have its own VRAM

 

also most phone can multi task and run 64 bits apps

 

so those eat ram

 

not to mention multi tab browsing of the internet

 

 

[Dujith]

Marketing. It sound better to say NOW WITH 8GB!!!! THATS MORE THEN THE OTHER.

And if you need to have a few games and other applications open at once then you might want it  

[Princess Luna]

Well you can use that much ram on a smartphone if you use Chrome with several tabs, games and all... depends on how you use your phone, me personally I have a laptop and a desktop so I literally just touch my phone to get google and telegram stupid 2 step codes.

[TopHatProductions115]

I'm waiting for phones that come with 16GB of LPDDR4. On that day, I'l finally be able to play Crysis - on Android  

[minibois]

It's partially not that optimized system for the RAM, how Chrome used to use soooo much RAM.

[asus killer]

unlike PC's where programs usually only run if you want to and let them, in phones there are always a lot of apps running on the background that eat up a lot of RAM, even if you think they are shut down so you can get the "you've got mail" message. 

[GoodBytes]

• Marketing
• Android is a dog, and like Chrome on PC needs a lot of RAM to be happy. (compared to other mobile OS).. but that was before. Now phones have enough RAM to run it, even on non-premium phones, but it put in peoples mind that they need more RAM.
• Most people don't close apps (including games) on their phone. they just switch to other apps. This is because smartphones doesn't have a task bar like on Windows telling them what is running and not. Background apps are put in suspended state. Now, normally under Windows, when you are limited in RAM, Windows will start dumping unused idle programs in it (that means it's off the RAM, and on your HDD/SSD, until you jump back to it, which will make it switch back to RAM so that the program can function). The thing is that for many years and still today if you look at non premium phones, smartphones doesn't have an SSD, and uses much much slower memory storage chips. This made the process of putting things on page file and out very slow. So app took time to become responsive. So it put the idea in people head that need more RAM to solve the problem, instead of closing apps.

 

2 hours ago, dragoon20005 said:

just like PC we play games on the phone and those game are almost have PS2/3 to Xbox one like Graphics

XBox One graphics? How about no.  Heck, even PS3....I would argue no, mostly due to OpenES and low polygons.

 

Quote

the RAM may be heavily used to load textures as the inbuild GPU do not have its own VRAM

True

 

Quote

also most phone can multi task and run 64 bits apps

Android* (assuming non routed where files where modified to achieve  extra things the OS was not suppose to support), iOS and Windows 10 Mobile are NOT multi-tasking OS. You cannot multitask on them. It can only operate 1 app at a time. The moment you switch app, the previous app is suspended and can no longer operate. This is also one of the reasons why Google made Chrome OS.

 

To hide the illusion that you can only do 1 thing at a time, you have the concept of services. So if you want music to play, for instance, the music app needs to register itself to the Audio service. And it will handle the music. Notice that you can't open 2 music player apps, and have them both play music, while being on a third app. Well... you can, but dev dirty tricks are needed. Under Windows, apps has no tricks to do. They don't know or care about other apps.

 

Now, as for the * on Android. In the recent version of Android, you can run 2 apps at ones, and so can you on an iPad with iOS. But that is only limited to 2 apps. While on Windows, you can run as many apps in the background, foreground, minimized, maximized as you want simultaneously.

 

As for notifications, the app registers it self to the notification services available, and it handles notifications alerts, not the app itself.

 

Quote

not to mention multi tab browsing of the internet

Ahem, Chrome issue.

[Taja]

Ram in cellphones is stupid. Really, unless you are a ULTRA POWER USER (which I dont even know how on a phone) you wont use a billion ram.

 

I use my phone A LOT, for youtube, Twitch, e-mail, google, facebook, whatsapp, messenger, spotify, pdf, Power point and etc. My phone stays ALWAYS using 1.6~1.9 Gb of ram... And it has pseudo 3Gb (2,8 is shown available). I got a 3Gb phone for other reasons, but I tought 3Gb would be a nice "future proofing", and boy I was right. 

I actually find offensive to see wasted ram like in these 8Gb models (which I bet will never use them... It would be fun if they lied and said 8Gb but only had 4Gb, no one would notice ever anyway). Well, there is a possibility to use that much ram: TONS of bloatware, which makes things even worse. 

[Zodiark1593]

I've seen Minecraft Pocket chew up as much as 900MB before. Chrome can get up to the 2GB mark with some tabs.

[Eduard the weeb]

yeah its really just for just the spec sheet tbh 6-10gb of ram is more then enough for like 99.8% of people, like even if you have like 30 apps open and are editing a photo for something like Instagram on Photo Shop express you won't use all the ram most likely

[GoodBytes]

11 hours ago, Eduard the weeb said:

yeah its really just for just the spec sheet tbh 6-10gb of ram is more then enough for like 99.8% of people, like even if you have like 30 apps open and are editing a photo for something like Instagram on Photo Shop express you won't use all the ram most likely

What is crazy in all of this, is that on PC when you buy 4GB of RAM, say.. you have modules of smaller capacity chips on a board (1 or 2 sticks with many chips).

On a phone, it is 1 or 2 chips at most.

 

So basically, it cost one heck a lot of money on phones to have that much RAM. What I am trying to say, is that it is making the phone cost a lot, for something is rarely or never used by most people.

[Bhav]

Well theres one tablet game I really enjoy but it turns to crap fast with only 2 Gb ram. Its also available on Steam but its taking ages for them to merge my android account so I can play it on steam.

 

I want to know what Nvidia were smoking when they only put 2 Gb in the Tegra K1 instead of the full 4 Gb it supports. I'd have paid extra for a 4 Gb version.

[Combustible Lemon]

Marketing.
Remember when Dual-core phones started to show up even when there was no support for them on Android before 4.0 (3.0 on tablets)?
Some of them never got ICS update (Motorola Atrix, for example) and you basically paid for hardware that never worked, just because the marketing department demand that the phone will have a dual-core processor?
Or that every phone had to have a fingerprint sensor, although the first sensors only worked about 50%  of the time?

Same with RAM now.

[Mitko_DSV]

To tell the truth, I didn't know phones with more than 6GB existed! And I only saw one phone with 6GB RAM in one ad on one occasion.

For me personally, even 1GB RAM on a phone is enough, but 2GB is better. My main phone (Z3 Compact) has 2GB of RAM and it's more than enough for me. My secondary phone (Xperia E3) has 1GB of RAM and it can be slow sometimes, but then again I have 50 tabs open in Chrome and 10 tabs in Opera at the same time.

[Bhav]

1 hour ago, dsv1999 said:

To tell the truth, I didn't know phones with more than 6GB existed! And I only saw one phone with 6GB RAM in one ad on one occasion.

For me personally, even 1GB RAM on a phone is enough, but 2GB is better. My main phone (Z3 Compact) has 2GB of RAM and it's more than enough for me. My secondary phone (Xperia E3) has 1GB of RAM and it can be slow sometimes, but then again I have 50 tabs open in Chrome and 10 tabs in Opera at the same time.

If you want to play mobile games, 2 Gb is not enough.

[wasab]

8 hours ago, Kartik Chopra said:

Just curious,

When you buy a mid spec laptop it generally comes with 4-8 gb RAM, which is usually sufficient,

 

but now a days phones have started coming with 6-8 gb RAM, there is even news about one packed with 10 gb,

 

Why is this so ? Do phones need more RAM in general, or are laptops under speced (they do not seem like), and do we actually need 8 gb RAM in phones ?

no,  phones DO NOT. OEMs had been greatly increasing it yearly, just like screen sizes for marketing purposes. People do not multitask on their phones as intensively as they would on a computer. Programs running on these devices are nowhere near as memory intensive as on a full fledged computer as well. If anything, your pc should get more rams instead of these mobile devices. 

[Zodiark1593]

9 minutes ago, Bhav said:

If you want to play mobile games, 2 Gb is not enough.

 

7 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

• Marketing
• Android is a dog, and like Chrome on PC needs a lot of RAM to be happy. (compared to other mobile OS).. but that was before. Now phones have enough RAM to run it, even on non-premium phones, but it put in peoples mind that they need more RAM.
• Most people don't close apps (including games) on their phone. they just switch to other apps. This is because smartphones doesn't have a task bar like on Windows telling them what is running and not. Background apps are put in suspended state. Now, normally under Windows, when you are limited in RAM, Windows will start dumping unused idle programs in it (that means it's off the RAM, and on your HDD/SSD, until you jump back to it, which will make it switch back to RAM so that the program can function). The thing is that for many years and still today if you look at non premium phones, smartphones doesn't have an SSD, and uses much much slower memory storage chips. This made the process of putting things on page file and out very slow. So app took time to become responsive. So it put the idea in people head that need more RAM to solve the problem, instead of closing apps.

 

XBox One graphics? How about no.  Heck, even PS3....I would argue no, mostly due to OpenES and low polygons.

 

 

While nowhere close to "current" consoles (besides the Switch), I can confidently say that the Snapdragon 800 from 2013 can come quite close to what early PS3 games looked like. This comes from fiddling with Unreal Engine 4 and running things on my old G2. Hardqare as far back as the Snapdragon 821 should have no problem outpacing the Xbox 360/PS3, that is, running at full speed.

 

Though I do agree in part with the ridiculous quantity of RAM on current phones. I find it extremely amusing that my phone, which runs maybe one or two "real" tasks at once, possesses the same amount of RAM as the PC in front of me that is serving no less than 4 user accounts with varying browsers and software (Adobe Reader) open.

 

The other amusing bit is this same phone has more memory bandwidth on hand than most of the systems at work here (excluding the few Skylake systems).

[manikyath]

you're comparing a baseline laptop to a top end phone.

 

my phone with 512MB runs just fine, they make laptops with 32GB ram (and more)

[aezakmi]

most android programs are so poorly optimized the manufacturers now just add more and more ram cause they know the software developers won't do shit to optimize, there would be no profit on that, if you make your program (let's say facebook) run great on entry level devices then customers won't buy $1000 devices

[Guest]

8 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

Android* (assuming non routed where files where modified to achieve  extra things the OS was not suppose to support), iOS and Windows 10 Mobile are NOT multi-tasking OS. You cannot multitask on them. It can only operate 1 app at a time. The moment you switch app, the previous app is suspended and can no longer operate. This is also one of the reasons why Google made Chrome OS.

In iOS services can be run in the background, however the apps, as you said, are suspended. Its not perfectly ideal but when multitasking was introduced devices had around 256MB of RAM needed to officially use multitasking. Thats a very small amount for Apple to let users have a decent experience. There were third-party tools such as Backgroundr to let you use similar multitasking as on Symbian - and keeps the apps completely running.

The main limitation of the next generation of iOS's capabilities is not current technology, but the previous generation. The x-1 generation of iPhone gets all capabilities of x (with a few exceptions, e.g. FaceTime on the 3GS - while capable not practical, and animojis, wireless charging). So when Apple needed to enable multitasking on the 3GS and iPod Touch 3G they needed a clever trick to save memory and swap useage. I guess they just decided to leave it, cause it works pretty well! On a smaller screen you really only need to focus on one app anyway, although you can enable split-screen on iPhones, it seems reasonable to keep it that way for efficiency.

[GoodBytes]

1 hour ago, RorzNZ said:

In iOS services can be run in the background, however the apps, as you said, are suspended. Its not perfectly ideal but when multitasking was introduced devices had around 256MB of RAM needed to officially use multitasking. Thats a very small amount for Apple to let users have a decent experience. There were third-party tools such as Backgroundr to let you use similar multitasking as on Symbian - and keeps the apps completely running.

The main limitation of the next generation of iOS's capabilities is not current technology, but the previous generation. The x-1 generation of iPhone gets all capabilities of x (with a few exceptions, e.g. FaceTime on the 3GS - while capable not practical, and animojis, wireless charging). So when Apple needed to enable multitasking on the 3GS and iPod Touch 3G they needed a clever trick to save memory and swap useage. I guess they just decided to leave it, cause it works pretty well! On a smaller screen you really only need to focus on one app anyway, although you can enable split-screen on iPhones, it seems reasonable to keep it that way for efficiency.

Well, its more than just RAM as well. It is battery life. Imagine leaving all those apps that people never close actively. Already people have issues where people have too many apps pulling notifications and such. So even if you had RAM, you won't see multi-tasking on phones (not in their current form at least), any time soon.

[Guest]

42 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Well, its more than just RAM as well. It is battery life. Imagine leaving all those apps that people never close actively. Already people have issues where people have too many apps pulling notifications and such. So even if you had RAM, you won't see multi-tasking on phones (not in their current form at least), any time soon.

I would say some nieche Android devices could be powerful enough to multitask. I could see some being developed for the Razer Phone, if they go ahead with the laptop project for their phone - otherwise I guess a dock like that would be pretty redundant. Its just speculation however. From a more practical viewpoint multitasking is only good when you can concentrate on more than one app.

[TopHatProductions115]

25 minutes ago, RorzNZ said:

I would say some nieche Android devices could be powerful enough to multitask. I could see some being developed for the Razer Phone, if they go ahead with the laptop project for their phone - otherwise I guess a dock like that would be pretty redundant. Its just speculation however. From a more practical viewpoint multitasking is only good when you can concentrate on more than one app.

Well, it could be both a software and a hardware complaint then. But last I checked, Android 7 and up allows for split-screen multitasking. So, Android has limited multitasking capabilities. In addition to this, Android SoC's tend to use ARM licenses, so:

https://thewireframecommunity.com/writing-a-basic-multitasking-os-for-arm-cortex-m3-processor

[dragoon20005]

14 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

 

XBox One graphics? How about no.  Heck, even PS3....I would argue no, mostly due to OpenES and low polygons.

 

 

 

Android* (assuming non routed where files where modified to achieve  extra things the OS was not suppose to support), iOS and Windows 10 Mobile are NOT multi-tasking OS. You cannot multitask on them. It can only operate 1 app at a time. The moment you switch app, the previous app is suspended and can no longer operate. This is also one of the reasons why Google made Chrome OS.

 

To hide the illusion that you can only do 1 thing at a time, you have the concept of services. So if you want music to play, for instance, the music app needs to register itself to the Audio service. And it will handle the music. Notice that you can't open 2 music player apps, and have them both play music, while being on a third app. Well... you can, but dev dirty tricks are needed. Under Windows, apps has no tricks to do. They don't know or care about other apps.

 

Now, as for the * on Android. In the recent version of Android, you can run 2 apps at ones, and so can you on an iPad with iOS. But that is only limited to 2 apps. While on Windows, you can run as many apps in the background, foreground, minimized, maximized as you want simultaneously.

 

As for notifications, the app registers it self to the notification services available, and it handles notifications alerts, not the app itself.

 

 

It prob depends on the game developer to make use of the phone in built GPU capability

EA made Need For Speed No Limits for the mobile and they use both OpenGL and Vulken API for the game and it does look stunning.

 

yes i agree to some point that ppl leave app running in the background without completely closing it.

 

Coming from my Samsung S4 to the current S7 Edge, I always have the habit of closing all my previous apps to clear the RAM being used. And also frequently clear my phone cache of any junk files.

 

With the current Android 7, true multi tasking is still not possible. Yes you can play your own music over the app that your are using.  

 

I still hate the fact I can't play my Youtube music play list while the screen is off.

My main browser for my phone is Firefox instead of Chrome. So my RAM usage isnt as bad

Prob the most RAM hungry app is prob Need For Speed No Limits