An interesting article regarding RAM...

[Ns1]

from AppleInsider...snippets here:

Apple itself has never announced the amount of RAM built into the iPad or iPhone, forcing curious parties to poke its software and examine X-rays of its chips to arrive at the conclusion that the company's latest A5 chip has the same 512MB as the last generation A4 chip of the original iPad and last year's iPhone 4 (albeit RAM of the faster LPDDR2 type).

Competing smartphones and tablets commonly claim a full GB or more of RAM, which some pundits have identified as an area of superiority over Apple's offerings. In keeping with its tightly controlled, highly secretive design process, Apple has never acknowledged or commented on why the A5 (shown below) has so little RAM on board.

While the idea that the operating system should be as efficient as possible with available RAM is certainly not new, Sinofsky then introduced a detailed explanation authored by Bill Karagounis, the group program manager of Microsoft's Performance team, to detail exactly why using less RAM is so critically important.

Karagounis points out that "minimizing memory usage on low-power platforms can prolong battery life," noting that "In any PC, RAM is constantly consuming power. If an OS uses a lot of memory, it can force device manufacturers to include more physical RAM. The more RAM you have on board, the more power it uses, the less battery life you get.

"Having additional RAM on a tablet device can, in some instances, shave days off the amount of time the tablet can sit on your coffee table looking off but staying fresh and up to date," Karagounis wrote.

The comments of Microsoft's engineers also highlight the fallacy of thinking that Windows 8 will be able to usher in a new wave of tablets that can do double duty as light weight, long life iPad-replacements and then switch into high gear to work as full power Windows desktop machines at the owner's whim.

As Karagounis points out, having enough RAM to run a full Windows environment simply makes it impossible to match the efficiency profile of a system that is designed to use less RAM, because the installed RAM chips are going to be bleeding battery life regardless of whether they are being fully utilized or not. Simply having RAM installed means less battery life, a fact punctuated by the battery-sapping tablets running Android 3.0 Honeycomb on 1GB of RAM.

Microsoft's explanation effectively endorses Apple's strategy for designing hardware purpose-built for the task at hand, either with minimal RAM when designed to coast for days as a low power device like the iPad or iPhone, or with enough RAM to do full work, but requiring a recharge after several hours of operation, like Apple's MacBook line of notebooks.

This also further clarifies the idea that next year's ARM-based Windows 8 tablets will need to have minimal RAM to compete with the iPad, and therefore won't be able to run full scale desktop software, regardless of whether developers recompile it for ARM chips. Adding more RAM would not only take a hit on battery life but would also make the systems more expensive, and like Android 3.0 licensees, preclude them from matching Apple's iPad in price.

http://www.appleinsider.com/article...ne_4s_motivated_by_battery_life_concerns.html

The last quote is the most interesting to me, because I was wondering how these Win8 tablets would stack up.

 

[foghorn67]

512mb or whatever it is sucks. A lot of apps are getting big, and it's chugaluga time. I really wish my iPhone came with a gig.