I remember the surprise that OnePlus gave with its 3T in 2016 like it was yesterday. It had 6GB of RAM. Samsung, LG, Huawei, Sony and the giants of the moment launched their products. flagships With 4GB of RAM, that’s the usual figure at the time. Six years later, six gigabytes of RAM are still a few standard-setting numbers. It is the most common RAM in the mid-range and, curiously, the number the iPhone 13 Pro has.
Is this figure enough for a phone? Does it make sense for the high-end standard to continue to rise? We wanted to reflect on this point. Explain What are manufacturers doing to increase RAM? without physically increasing it and why we seem “stuck” at six gigabytes.
AMR fever, past illness
Bigger (and better) hardware, longer (and better) lifespan. Based on this basic principle, any improvement in the amount of RAM memory is positive… up to a certain point. The vast majority of phones in the large mid-range segment, Basic versions with 6GB of RAM (We usually talk about the input range to get down to 4GB). That figure seems like the comfort zone we don’t want to get out of, with 8GB of RAM reserved for more ambitious versions and high-end models, and 12GB of RAM for the most premium ones.
To understand whether larger amounts of RAM are required in Android (we’ll talk about iOS later), it’s worth remembering some of them. keys to its functioning. Every time we launch an app in Android we create a process. This process requires a certain amount of memory to run, and this amount of memory may increase for each function the application performs.
This is what you are looking for in Android RAM is as useful as possible, so it tends to fill up regardless of whether we have 6 or 12 GB of RAM. When an app doesn’t have enough space to open in RAM, Android resorts to solutions like compressing the list of inactive or less active processes (ZRAM SWAP), or directly, to close apps and processes that it considers lower priority.
The more RAM we have, the easier it is for the system to run a large number of applications.or run applications that require significant memory space without closing the others.
Do we need more than 6 GB of RAM?
Understanding the basic workings of RAM, the approach seems a priori simple: as long as RAM can keep the applications we use active, “no more is needed.” But when thinking about RAM it’s not appropriate to think about the RAM you need todayworth considering RAM you will need in two or three years. These processes, which currently occupy 300 megabytes, may continue to occupy 500 in two years, the next heavy game will increase to almost gigabytes, and the operating system will demand more and more resources.
Instead of increasing the physical RAM, manufacturers virtual RAM, since 128 GB began to be standard memory. The most modest mobiles can virtualize 2 or 3 GB of RAM, and there are even those that virtualize 7 GB. This memory is slower than physicalbut it is more than enough to make up for minor shortcomings in the capacity that the middle class may have.
On the Apple side, which has always had almost half the RAM compared to high-end Android, the iPhone has jumped to 6GB with the 12 Pro and, to my surprise, things will continue in 2022 and possibly 2023. .
Source: Xataka
I’m Sandra Torres, a passionate journalist and content creator. My specialty lies in covering the latest gadgets, trends and tech news for Div Bracket. With over 5 years of experience as a professional writer, I have built up an impressive portfolio of published works that showcase my expertise in this field.