4 ms·

Only 1GB RAM?! bah humbug

kylelibra 13y ago
I was hoping they had finally bumped it up to 2gb, but I guess not. I often read this is related to battery life, can anyone corroborate?
- jevinskie 13y ago
  DRAM requires periodic refreshing or the cells lose their memory. This refreshing uses energy. More bits, more energy. You get the same issue with SRAM (think CPU caches) though without the refreshing.
- krallja 13y ago
  Yes, DRAM requires power to refresh its memory. That's why computers can't use DRAM as permanent storage.
- glasshead969 13y ago
  At least it's LPDDR3, so it should be faster than iPhone 5.
auctiontheory 13y ago
Yeah, that's a surprise. Increasing RAM would surely have been an easy way to speed up video editing. What else are we to do with the fancy camera?!
- Aloha 13y ago
  I never considered video editing a key application for my mobile telephone. Even with the camera, I would expect to take the video on the phone, and edit it elsewhere.
  - JeremyBanks 13y ago
    The iPhone is not a mobile telephone.
    - Aloha 13y ago
      Then what is it exactly? I have an iPhone, it makes a pretty great mobile telephone!
      - nkuttler 13y ago
        A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device. An iPod … a phone … and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone … are you getting it?
        Aloha 13y ago
        It's still a phone, even if it does all of those other things.
  - auctiontheory 13y ago
    You'd be amazed. You can shoot, edit, and post an entire short movie from your phone, without involving any larger device. I have done it myself. Another way to look at it: if you're not rendering video ... I think we've reached the point where faster (benchmarked) hardware adds little to no functional benefit. So why upgrade?
- blinkingled 13y ago
  The iPad definitely needs more RAM though. Whenever I use it, I quickly get annoyed by Safari/Chrome reloading pages and background apps disappearing due to OOM.
  - josephlord 13y ago
    This doesn't seem to happen on iOS7. Note that I know it must happen but however they are doing it/hiding it it doesn't bother me as much.
UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
So really with the 64 bit architecture this phone has effectively less RAM than the iPhone 5? To maintain backwards compatibility between legacy 32 bit and new 64 bit processes Apple will have to stick two copies of their library into RAM, plus any native applications running in 64 bit mode will consume more RAM than their 32 bit counterparts anyway (12%~ more). I love how this review is basically "THIS IS THE MOST EXCITING S RELEASE EVER (but I cannot really explain why, here is me dismissing most of the new features of this phone: Evolutionary camera, 64 bit which is meaningless today, gimmicky fingerprint reader, faster A processor which makes it almost competitive with Intel's last generation, etc)." I think it is entertaining that tons of Apple's fans have been claiming entirely without basis that this phone would have 2 GB of RAM in it and that was largely their explanation for the 64 bit-eating RAM-issue, now it only has 1 GB still I wonder how they'll magic that huge deficit away.
- joakleaf 13y ago
  It takes a lot to hit that RAM barrier on iOS with code. Yes 64-bit code takes up more space than 32-bit code, but the majority of memory is not used for code. It is used for images etc. -- Most apps do not use large amounts of memory for pointer intense structures or contain tens of megabytes of code. Also, 64-bit addressing may be "meaningless" today if you disregard memory mapping of content (into virtual memory), but , as stated in the review, the 64-bit architecture comes with couple of other improvements including increasing the # registers.
  - makomk 13y ago
    From what I recall, don't web browsers tend to be fairly pointer heavy though?

I was hoping they had finally bumped it up to 2gb, but I guess not. I often read this is related to battery life, can anyone corroborate?

jevinskie 13y ago
DRAM requires periodic refreshing or the cells lose their memory. This refreshing uses energy. More bits, more energy. You get the same issue with SRAM (think CPU caches) though without the refreshing.
krallja 13y ago
Yes, DRAM requires power to refresh its memory. That's why computers can't use DRAM as permanent storage.
glasshead969 13y ago
At least it's LPDDR3, so it should be faster than iPhone 5.

auctiontheory 13y ago

Yeah, that's a surprise. Increasing RAM would surely have been an easy way to speed up video editing. What else are we to do with the fancy camera?!

Aloha 13y ago
I never considered video editing a key application for my mobile telephone. Even with the camera, I would expect to take the video on the phone, and edit it elsewhere.
- JeremyBanks 13y ago
  The iPhone is not a mobile telephone.
  - Aloha 13y ago
    Then what is it exactly? I have an iPhone, it makes a pretty great mobile telephone!
    - nkuttler 13y ago
      A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device. An iPod … a phone … and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone … are you getting it?
      - Aloha 13y ago
        It's still a phone, even if it does all of those other things.
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  You'd be amazed. You can shoot, edit, and post an entire short movie from your phone, without involving any larger device. I have done it myself. Another way to look at it: if you're not rendering video ... I think we've reached the point where faster (benchmarked) hardware adds little to no functional benefit. So why upgrade?
blinkingled 13y ago
The iPad definitely needs more RAM though. Whenever I use it, I quickly get annoyed by Safari/Chrome reloading pages and background apps disappearing due to OOM.
- josephlord 13y ago
  This doesn't seem to happen on iOS7. Note that I know it must happen but however they are doing it/hiding it it doesn't bother me as much.

UnoriginalGuy 13y ago

So really with the 64 bit architecture this phone has effectively less RAM than the iPhone 5? To maintain backwards compatibility between legacy 32 bit and new 64 bit processes Apple will have to stick two copies of their library into RAM, plus any native applications running in 64 bit mode will consume more RAM than their 32 bit counterparts anyway (12%~ more). I love how this review is basically "THIS IS THE MOST EXCITING S RELEASE EVER (but I cannot really explain why, here is me dismissing most of the new features of this phone: Evolutionary camera, 64 bit which is meaningless today, gimmicky fingerprint reader, faster A processor which makes it almost competitive with Intel's last generation, etc)." I think it is entertaining that tons of Apple's fans have been claiming entirely without basis that this phone would have 2 GB of RAM in it and that was largely their explanation for the 64 bit-eating RAM-issue, now it only has 1 GB still I wonder how they'll magic that huge deficit away.

joakleaf 13y ago
It takes a lot to hit that RAM barrier on iOS with code. Yes 64-bit code takes up more space than 32-bit code, but the majority of memory is not used for code. It is used for images etc. -- Most apps do not use large amounts of memory for pointer intense structures or contain tens of megabytes of code. Also, 64-bit addressing may be "meaningless" today if you disregard memory mapping of content (into virtual memory), but , as stated in the review, the 64-bit architecture comes with couple of other improvements including increasing the # registers.
- makomk 13y ago
  From what I recall, don't web browsers tend to be fairly pointer heavy though?