12GB seems an odd number, when it's usually multiples of 8. Anyone else think that? I wonder if it's because of size constraints?
I would imagine the odd size could be due to yields of the new memory.
EDIT: thanks Child post for correcting my typo.
This reminds me of triple-core processors that were "inconceivable" right until they shipped.
Why? Why not 8? Whatever, I doubt I've ever seen a phone with more than 2 GB RAM. I wish my phone was as powerful as my PC (which is very old, has 4 GB RAM and can't handle more because of the chipset limitations) so I could just attach peripherals I want, boot a desktop Linux (directly or in a VM) and use it instead of the PC.
So they can sell you 8 next year. And 10-12 the year after that. And 16 after that. And so on and so forth...
> I doubt I've ever seen a phone with more than 2 GB RAM.
- The first phone with more than 2GB of RAM was the Samsung Note 3 back in 2013 - with 3GB.
- Almost every "flagship" phone since 2015/16 has had 4GB of RAM or more. So if you've seen people using phones on the street, subway, office, etc in the last 3 years, you've seen phones with more than 2GB of RAM.
> I wish my phone was as powerful as my PC...so I could just attach peripherals I want, boot a desktop Linux (directly or in a VM) and use it instead of the PC.
That would be awesome and is my ideal view of the mobile computing future.
Samsung Note 3 is exactly the model of my phone. I've always believed it has just 2 GiBs. Let me check...
Yes. free -g in Termux says 2. However...
... free -m says 2834 which means ~2.77 GiB. Well, this indeed is "more than 2GB of RAM" but not much and what a weird number...
> That would be awesome and is my ideal view of the mobile computing future.
Seems like it's the past already. There were numerous attempts (successful in a way or another) years ago and despite the fact smartphones become more and more powerful and add more RAM this approach still doesn't show signs of becoming popular and the most hyped projects get either discontinued or stagnant.
A number of workstations that I have designed has used 2 sticks of 4GB RAM, and 2 sticks of 2GB RAM. This has saved money at little to no cost to performance.
Perhaps Micron is doing something similar here?
Once you hit the ceiling a whole bunch of disciplines have to change overnight. Better to give them a 25-50% bump and start the story about horizontal scalability before you’re entirely out of other options.
I've been running 16-32GB for a very long time now. Servers can go into the multiple TB ranges.
https://prod.micron.com/~/media/documents/products/data-shee...
Page 28:
"For non-binary memory densities, only a half of the row address space is valid. When the MSB address bit is HIGH, then the MSB-1 address bit must be LOW."
They basically cut off the upper 1/4 of the address decoder.