But our greed of expecting more abilities from a smartphone seems never ending. Fortunately, OEMs are striving hard to meet our expectations-VR, AR, Modularity, 4K display, etc., are few examples that manifest the modern age capabilities of a smartphone. To support these features, a smartphone should have powerful hardware under the hood. Today, Samsung launched industry’s first humungous 8GB LPDDR4 mobile DRAM package, which will be manufactured by advanced 10nm process technology. How will it affect the performance?
RAM is the place in a computing device where the operating system (OS), application programs and data in current use are kept so they can be quickly reached by the device’s processor. RAM is much faster to read from and write to than other kinds of storage in a computer, such as a hard disk drive (HDD), solid-state drive (SSD) or optical drive. Nevertheless, RAM operates at lower speeds compared to the processor. It will become more easy for CPU to execute tasks if RAM can provide information faster. The new 8GB LPDDR4 operates at up to 4,266 megabits per second (Mbps), which is twice as fast as DDR4 DRAM for PCs working typically at 2,133 Mbps per pin. So, you can expect superior performance with this new chip. Another giant leap is moving from 20nm to 10nm manufacturing process. This will increase the performance, decrease the power consumption, and dwindle the size of the chip. To know more about the affect of manufacturing process, please refer to this article. Overall, it enhances the phone’s ability to perform CPU intensive taks like 4K UHD video playback, AR, VR. Other Side of the Coin At the same time, one question that haunts many users is how effectively OEMs can harness the RAM. If you have seen our interview with Carl Pie, co-founder of Oneplus, where he revealed that Oneplus 3 only uses 4GB out of 6GB RAM to perform operations and rest to enhance the camera output, you may feel 8GB of RAM is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. It is also worth noting that, Apple with 3GB RAM outperforms any phone with 6GB RAM Android phone. That said, we are not sure what ground-breaking may come in the future and to be prepared for it is not a bad idea. In a nutshell, 8GB RAM may sound absurd now, but it may come handy in future.
