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Comment by heliumtera | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you're going to see phones with 512gb VRAM+RAM in your lifetime.

When I was a kid I recall my cousin upgrading his computer to 1 or 2 MB so that we could get some extra features when playing Wing Commander 1. That was 1990.

35 years later, burner phones regularly come with 4 GB of RAM these days. 3 order of magnitude difference, not taking into account miniaturization and speed improvements.

In another 35 years who knows what will happen. Yeah things can't improve at the same pace forever but I would be surprised if anyone back in 1990 could predict the level of technology you can get at every corner store today.

Maybe it's not that everyone gets an RTX 5090 in our pocket, but maybe it's that LLMs now can run on rpi. Realistically it's probably something in the middle.

When I was a kid in Elementary we used DOS computers with maybe 4MB of RAM or few MB and the Play Station wasn't many times powerful. A few years (two or three) later we got Windows 95/98 with 128 times more RAM. A few years later, computers could emulate more or less the PSX and the N64, all within six years.

The PlayStation 5 (16GB) has only twice as much RAM as the PlayStation 4 (8GB), and the PlayStation 6 will likely have just 1.5x as much as the PS5: 24GB. And even that might be optimistic with the recent explosion of memory price.

This is a joke right? Not even 10 years ago the first phones with 4GB RAM came out, today there are quite a few phones with 24GB. At that rate we'll be at 512GB by around 2040.

I don't think there are "quite a few" phones with 24GB. For example, even the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, which is one of the most expensive ones out there, only has 12GB DRAM.

Maybe he fell for the 12 + 12 crap they advertise where half the memory is swap

Phones have as much memory as Android requires, not much more. A low end thinkpad 10 years ago had 8gb memory, and today is same capacity bit more modern and faster. By the same rate we would have a very very fast 8gb memory thinkpad by 2040. Same thing with GPUs. Mid range GPU 10 years ago had 12gb VRAM, mid range AMD GPU last generation (6600xt) had 8gb and 7600xt 16gb, Nvidia 5060 comes at 8gb/16gb.

Phones with 4gb ram is not feasible today because they wouldnt be able to run Android and phone home comfortably, even being a thin client requires running Android and react application on electron. 4gb is not good.

In 2040 phones will came out with the bare minimum to run Android, all the stupid Chinese apps Android distro pushes into consumers, and a react application on electron.

I took it as a comment on the economics of RAM, but I think the current state is transitory (does AI continue apace? Prices will eventually justify more competitors, even at tremendous startup cost. AI crashes? More RAM for the proles)

A tech-optimist would perceive this as a death-threat! :,-)

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