4 ms·

A balanced read. One surprising thing about the iPhone (and about the iPad) is that it still only comes with 256MB of RAM. They seem to accomplish a heck of a

by ergo98 16y ago

A balanced read. One surprising thing about the iPhone (and about the iPad) is that it still only comes with 256MB of RAM. They seem to accomplish a heck of a lot with that, yet still that is very constricted once you start talking about multitasking and the like. It is a pretty major update, but really the Giz leaks among others did take some steam out of it. It isn't as big of news simply because it isn't news - we long knew about it.

sp332 16y ago
“Another key concept is ‘think small’. We have not begun to reach the limits of what can be done with 64K bytes of memory and a single mass storage device. It is important to hold to these limitations in order to keep the project from burgeoning into a huge, expensive and time consuming effort.” -- Jef Raskin, during the design of the first Macintosh (from http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/macintosh-project-genesis-and-history-16-feb-1981/ http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/macintosh-project-genesis-an... )
- boredguy8 16y ago
  I don't think he was working with frame or layer buffers on a color display at 1024x768.
  - access_denied 16y ago
    Yeah, but 64k and 256Mb are different numbers. And as you already know: 640k oughta be enough for anybody.
  - potatolicious 16y ago
    The point remains valid: the iPhone software absolutely screams, and in many cases achieves better UI performance on Android hardware that is twice as fast. There's something to be said for not writing everything in Java ;) We don't have the hardware problem so well licked that we can disregard it. IMHO programming phones like we program desktops is a serious mistake, and seriously hamper what we can do with mobiles (e.g., bloatier code results in need for faster hardware with little performance gain for it, thus raising battery, heat, device size problems).
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
illumin8 16y ago
I've heard this 256MB limit that you see on all the smartphones now is because the ARM A8 architecture they are based on only has 256MB of RAM on the die. I think this is the biggest limitation that these devices have right now. I love my iPad, but it kills me to have the occasional "crash to desktop" just because Safari ran out of memory. My prediction - next year we'll see A9 based smartphones/tablets with 512MB-1GB of RAM and these memory starvation issues will be a thing of the past. It certainly doesn't bode well in the short term for early adopters though. The post PC era is upon us - too bad the hardware (and software) is still in it's infancy.
- ergo98 16y ago
  >I've heard this 256MB limit that you see on all the smartphones now is because the ARM A8 architecture they are based on only has 256MB of RAM on the die Possible, though the Evo 4G, Nexus One, HTC Dream, among a variety of other Android devices are coming with 512MB these days. One weird thing, though, is that one of the feature notes of Android 2.2 is "HIGHMEM support for RAM >256MB", so not sure how that plays into this.
  - masklinn 16y ago
    I believe those phones are on Snapdragon, which is an arch based on the Cortex A8 but not a vanilla A8 is it?
  - barake 16y ago
    Android 2.1 and earlier shipped with a kernel that could only see 256MB of RAM, and 2.2 fixes this. A bunch of HTC Passion/Desire/Incredible/Evo users are about to get a performance boost with Dalvik JIT and double the RAM.
- drivebyacct 16y ago
  You act as if "first movers" ever don't get screwed by Apple. I understand that technology is constantly evolving and that by time I buy a phone, a better one is being produced, but I can't shake the feeling that Apple schedules their releases and features in ways that maximize their revenue. I suppose I can't really blame them for that. It just makes the whole thing seem less "magical" the way some act like Apple is just the most innovative and new company in the whole wide world. Also, I still can't help but laugh at this moniker of the "post PC era". The rest of us are still doing real work in Windows, Mac, Linux and the smartphone/tablets are accessories.

by ergo98 16y ago

sp332 16y ago

“Another key concept is ‘think small’. We have not begun to reach the limits of what can be done with 64K bytes of memory and a single mass storage device. It is important to hold to these limitations in order to keep the project from burgeoning into a huge, expensive and time consuming effort.” -- Jef Raskin, during the design of the first Macintosh (from http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/macintosh-project-genesis-and-history-16-feb-1981/ http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/macintosh-project-genesis-an... )

boredguy8 16y ago
I don't think he was working with frame or layer buffers on a color display at 1024x768.
- access_denied 16y ago
  Yeah, but 64k and 256Mb are different numbers. And as you already know: 640k oughta be enough for anybody.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  The point remains valid: the iPhone software absolutely screams, and in many cases achieves better UI performance on Android hardware that is twice as fast. There's something to be said for not writing everything in Java ;) We don't have the hardware problem so well licked that we can disregard it. IMHO programming phones like we program desktops is a serious mistake, and seriously hamper what we can do with mobiles (e.g., bloatier code results in need for faster hardware with little performance gain for it, thus raising battery, heat, device size problems).

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

illumin8 16y ago

I've heard this 256MB limit that you see on all the smartphones now is because the ARM A8 architecture they are based on only has 256MB of RAM on the die. I think this is the biggest limitation that these devices have right now. I love my iPad, but it kills me to have the occasional "crash to desktop" just because Safari ran out of memory. My prediction - next year we'll see A9 based smartphones/tablets with 512MB-1GB of RAM and these memory starvation issues will be a thing of the past. It certainly doesn't bode well in the short term for early adopters though. The post PC era is upon us - too bad the hardware (and software) is still in it's infancy.

ergo98 16y ago
>I've heard this 256MB limit that you see on all the smartphones now is because the ARM A8 architecture they are based on only has 256MB of RAM on the die Possible, though the Evo 4G, Nexus One, HTC Dream, among a variety of other Android devices are coming with 512MB these days. One weird thing, though, is that one of the feature notes of Android 2.2 is "HIGHMEM support for RAM >256MB", so not sure how that plays into this.
- masklinn 16y ago
  I believe those phones are on Snapdragon, which is an arch based on the Cortex A8 but not a vanilla A8 is it?
- barake 16y ago
  Android 2.1 and earlier shipped with a kernel that could only see 256MB of RAM, and 2.2 fixes this. A bunch of HTC Passion/Desire/Incredible/Evo users are about to get a performance boost with Dalvik JIT and double the RAM.
drivebyacct 16y ago
You act as if "first movers" ever don't get screwed by Apple. I understand that technology is constantly evolving and that by time I buy a phone, a better one is being produced, but I can't shake the feeling that Apple schedules their releases and features in ways that maximize their revenue. I suppose I can't really blame them for that. It just makes the whole thing seem less "magical" the way some act like Apple is just the most innovative and new company in the whole wide world. Also, I still can't help but laugh at this moniker of the "post PC era". The rest of us are still doing real work in Windows, Mac, Linux and the smartphone/tablets are accessories.