Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hillary_Pe | Hacker News Reader

Only 1GB RAM?! bah humbug

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.

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.

From what I recall, don't web browsers tend to be fairly pointer heavy though?

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?!

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.

The iPhone is not a mobile telephone.

Then what is it exactly?

I have an iPhone, it makes a pretty great mobile telephone!

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?

It's still a phone, even if it does all of those other things.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

Yes, DRAM requires power to refresh its memory. That's why computers can't use DRAM as permanent storage.

At least it's LPDDR3, so it should be faster than iPhone 5.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com