Android Phone Hits 24GB of RAM, As Much As a 13-Inch MacBook Pro (arstechnica.com) 60
The new Nubia RedMagic 8S Pro+ features support for up to 24GB of RAM -- the same amount of RAM found in a 13-inch top-spec M2 MacBook Pro. Ars Technica reports: The base model of the RedMagic 8S Pro+ starts with 16GB of RAM, but GSMArena has pictures and details of the upgraded 24GB SKU, which is the most amount of memory ever in an Android phone. Because we're all about big numbers, it also comes with 1TB of storage. This suped-up 24GB version of the phone appears to be a China-exclusive, with the price at CNY 7,499 (about $1,034), which is a lot for a phone in China. Other specs include a new "Snapdragon 8+ Gen 2" variant, which appears to be the same higher-clocked version that Samsung gets for the S23. This runs at 3.36 GHz as opposed to the normal 3.2 GHz. There's a 6.8-inch, 120 Hz 2480x1116 OLED display and a 5000 mAh battery with a blazing-fast 165 W charging that can fully charge in 14 minutes. The display has an under-screen front camera, because selfies would just get in the way of gaming.
The design is interesting -- it's just all right angles without a single smoothed-over edge on the entire phone. The sides are flat, the back is flat, and the corners are super tall, with almost no corner radius at all. In landscape mode, there are touch-sensitive shoulder buttons along the top edge for additional gaming controls, but it does not look comfortable to have to wrap your fingers around those hard corners. Just picture the smooth curves of an SNES controller compared to this thing -- even the example image does not look very comfortable. For color options, it comes in black, silver, or a clear back panel with a faux-mechanical design under it, just like a Nothing Phone. That little rainbow circle on the back is a spinning, 20,000 RPM blower fan that pushes heat out the side, so you'll presumably be gaming with cool temps for a long time. The phone is up for pre-order today in China and ships on July 11.
The design is interesting -- it's just all right angles without a single smoothed-over edge on the entire phone. The sides are flat, the back is flat, and the corners are super tall, with almost no corner radius at all. In landscape mode, there are touch-sensitive shoulder buttons along the top edge for additional gaming controls, but it does not look comfortable to have to wrap your fingers around those hard corners. Just picture the smooth curves of an SNES controller compared to this thing -- even the example image does not look very comfortable. For color options, it comes in black, silver, or a clear back panel with a faux-mechanical design under it, just like a Nothing Phone. That little rainbow circle on the back is a spinning, 20,000 RPM blower fan that pushes heat out the side, so you'll presumably be gaming with cool temps for a long time. The phone is up for pre-order today in China and ships on July 11.
Its because (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Its because (Score:3)
Re: Its because (Score:2)
Dex for the win... I use it on my corporate network to use my personal phone as a computer for things like personal email :-)
It's not without its faults, but overall it works great. Samsung also sells a line of monitors with Dex built in, so you can hook your phone directly to your monitor as a full computing environment.
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The day Apple decides this is a thing they want to do and give us an iPhone that docks and turns into an OSX mac is the day. Yeah we've had this sort of thing for a while, but it never took off, frankly cos Apple doesnt do it.
Thats the real shame about Windows Phone being a turkey and eventually dying, because a Windows phone that you could dock and it turns into a proper Windows desktop would fundamentally change the whole market.
I think this was Microsofts plan, but they got stupid and tried to push those
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It's been tried probably at least a half dozen times already.
I remember in the Windows Mobile days there were at least a couple of devices that could "dock" into a mini-laptop based device to get you a "laptop" with a keyboard and screen.
Then Motorola did it on Android, and Samsung did
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I'm not the most knowledgeable in this stuff, but isn't that basically the catch? The thing that people want from Windows is support for x86 software. So either you get an x86 phone which lasts for 20 minutes on battery, is huge, is hot. Or you get Windows on ARM which is a completely new system without support for all that x86 software. I really think Microsoft is going to be the x86 software company for the rest of its (wishfully short) life. Whether they rent that to you through the cloud or not doesn't
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I get the point you're trying to make, but it's worth saying that all processor cores are not equal. The 4 cores in your phone are optimized for using the least wattage possible in order to make the battery last. A notebook, and especially a desktop are not constrained in the same way, and have far more volume for including thermal management solutions enabling using more wattage per unit time, thus more performance.
It's remarkable how much performance you can get from a phone's SoC these days, but it's s
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follow that rabbit hole you end at differences in cache architecture - a high performance cpu needs a low latency cache architecture - a high performance gpu needs a high bandwidth cache architecture - phones are currently somewhere in the middle with regard to their cache architecture while desktops with integrated graphics boast the state of the art in low latency L0/L1
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I've been predicting that very thing since the 90's, though back then I thought it was the PDA that would turn into your laptop/desktop. with the right doc. We've seen it tried several times over the years, but it has yet to catch on, due in no small part to many of the attempts leaning on the novelty to make up for low specs.
It's certainly achievable these days. A laptop shell, with a proper keyboard, display, touchpad, ports, and extended battery could easily be a $200 accessory. A phone's existing US
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In theory, an instance of the native system Webview library should be no worse than a separate tab in a single browser. I don't know how many tabs I have open in Chrome on my phone but I do see a smiley face. My phone runs fine (though it does have 12GB of RAM).
Re: Its because (Score:2)
You would be amazed with an iPhone. I can do all of that with 2GB RAM.
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Exactly right. And the problem is just going to get exponentially worse. We'll soon need a terabyte of RAM to use an app that does hardly anything.
Re:Its because (Score:4, Informative)
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Those programmers died out with the space program of the 60's and 70's.
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Those programmers died out with the space program of the 60's and 70's.
Or we retired quietly.
I miss the days of writing quick, simple command-line utilities for the IBM PC environment...in x86 Assembly.
When a utility can be up to 100x smaller when compiled in Assembly compared to the most efficient higher level coding languages of the day (because of the required library modules).
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I don't. Turbo Pascal was quite efficient and much more comfortable and for routines where speed mattered, inline assembler was good enough.
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If I remember correctly...the single standard library that had to be included into any program compiled under Turbo Pascal was between 2KB and 3KB.
Many of the utilities that I wrote used IBM PC BIOS routines. Writing my programs in Assembler to access those BIOS routines regularly yielded binaries that were 10x to 100x smaller than any program I wrote in Turbo Pascal that only used the standard library (unit).
I don't miss those days of having to build my own utilities. And I certainly do not miss programmin
Re: Its because (Score:2)
At least on iOS, the fact that thereâ(TM)s 20 browsers doesnâ(TM)t in itself cause RAM usage - they all map the same memory for the libraries for the browser itself (this is one of the benefits of everyone being required to use the same browser engine). That said, yes, using a browser as an app engine is horribly memory intensive compared to using native controls. Lazy devs and managers who care more about saving a buck on development than the userâ(TM)s experience abound. I donâ(TM)t
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That's now how web browsing on Android works. There is a built in webview component that provides it, and is shared between all apps that use it. Few apps bother incorporating their own browser, when they can easily use webview.
On iOS I think you aren't actually allowed to implement your own browser, you have to use the iOS built in web view thing. For example, Chrome and Firefox on iOS both use the build in and crippled Safari web view engine.
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No. It's because a big number makes the phone e-penis bigger and sells better. The existence of a 24GB phone doesn't suit any current market need, and there's no issue running Android at all with 6GB of RAM.
I'm all for a rant about inefficient apps, but if this were an actual use case then Android would be non-functional on the overwhelming majority of devices on the market. But it isn't. Apps are fine, and this is nothing more than a daft marketing move.
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Which is why iOS is extremely aggressive about completely suspending apps when they go off screen.
It's not super developer-friendly to say "no CPU for you period stop", but when working with most apps that can't be trusted not to do dumb things, the top-down imposed solution becomes appealing as a matter of tradeoffs.
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automatic isnt the only way to deal with garbage, even when the garbage collector can do it.
take a little bit of control - a little bit of responsibility - a single line of code, well placed, because its fucking responsible
GC.Collect();
the default behavior of the garbage collector is not well suited to long lived applications - its going for the big win, pu
Job well done! (Score:1, Offtopic)
A smartphone only sold in China. A victory for SEO!
What a childlike comparison (Score:1)
Re: What a childlike comparison (Score:2)
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Such a seemingly random comparison. Why are they comparing a Andriod phone to a Macbook Pro?
Right? Someone needs counselling - stat. Almost all my desktops have had 32GB+ RAM for the last 10 years. RAM as a measurement of anything realted to performance is nonsense... the sort of nonsense Apple-fans spew with relish.
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I had 16 gigs for last six. I run a gameboard with an LCD screen that shows my core usage and memory usage in real time.
I almost never see it go above 50%. Of the handful of time it went above it, it was a heavy game coupled with several background pieces of software opened at the same time and being actively run on another screen and me alt tabbing between them.
I think I actually hit the memory limit and see swapping once, because a game just bugged out hard and sucked up all the memory as it was about to
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It's stat marketing. More is better, so if your product has more than everyone else, your product is better than everyone else! It doesn't matter if you never actually use all that RAM, or that having more RAM means more amps out of the battery to refresh the millions of largely unused bits; it's MOAR!
Kind of like at the dawn of Android phones when everyone was competing on having a processor with a few hundred thousand more clocks than the other guy - never mind that the processor downclocked itself 99%
640k (Score:3)
Is more than you should ever need to make phone calls.
If you settle for ascii art pr0n, I suppose it could be all you ever need.
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640k won't even load a handful of photos for the address book. The visual cues save me a ton of time.
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you just insist on 4k thumbnails
640K is ten times larger than the standard vga video buffer, which if you are not aware, was used to view photos among other things.
everything is slow because the king of data abstraction layers (the database) is amazingly good at the data access patterns you arent primarily using while amazingly bad at the ones you are primarily using, and there are two major villains here: the minor app that uses a full blown database to store its 3 settings, the major app
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And updates stop a week after you buy it
Assuming it gets any updates at all.
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some of them are there specifically to slow your old phone down trying to get you to buy a new one
others add new amazing technology that you are never told about, amazing tracking algorithms, that are labeled something different
and hey, time to accept a new terms of service, and take a look at the new privacy policy you are now subject to
when is their change to the privacy policy ever in your favor?
not getting updates is very arguably a feature
Exponential growth in memory requirements (Score:2)
Dude when the commodore 128 came out with DOUBLE the ram of the C-64 (128 kilobytes baby! yeah!) I thought that ought to be enough for anybody. So now I'm rolling maxed out with 128 GB of RAM on the machine I am typing this on. It's snappy and I've got a bunch of applications and environments open. As far as games, we had International Karate Plus instead of Mortal Kombat 11 .. But man, there is no way the game experience and feeling you get is one MILLION times more enhanced.
Opposite of what's needed. (Score:4, Interesting)
And extra ram *uses* battery.
Until my smartphone battery can last through the day under a full load, I'd rather have less ram in order to extend my battery life.
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Browsers use lots of RAM on some sites, so it might be useful even for some nongamers. I've got 3 different browsers on my phone - I use them for different things. Firef
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So unless people are swapping and relaunching apps a few time a minute 24x7, it's hard for me to believe to cpu usage even for power users would drain as much as having all that extra ram.
I'd have to see data to be able to belive that claim.
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It doesn't matter what you like to believe -- the same version of my phone with 6G of RAM has much better battery life than its 4G RAM variant. And 8G or 12G would probably be even better -- especially if using the camera + browser (or some
As I already mentioned in another comment, there's no instantaneous "swapping and relaunching" after an app has been killed by the OS on Android -- it has to painfully restore everything from scratch.
Re:Opposite of what's needed. (Score:4, Insightful)
My android phone has 6G RAM and the OS still has to kill all the browser processes when taking a picture with its 64MP camera.
And that's causing a 2 to 3 second delay when switching back to the last page, since the browser has to restart from scratch. And contrary to what people here seem to assume, there's no "suspend to disk" at work -- the browser will simply restore the last session in the same way its desktop variant does when you choose "restore last session" from its menu.
And that's the same for any android app -- any app has to assume that it can be killed at any moment, and when that happens, there would be no chance save its state. There's no magic -- as any android programmer knows, you have to periodically save the state to permanent storage, and restore it by hand when starting up again.
Considering how bad all this it, throwing more RAM does help tremendously wrt. general usability on Android.
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it solves your problem with the shit developers that dont give a shit
it solves the shit developers problem of obviously being shit
your camera app actively touches 6 gigs of memory because its shit written by shit developers that didnt give a shit
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I'm not ram-limited for things I want to do on my phone, I'm battery limited.
And extra ram *uses* battery.
Until my smartphone battery can last through the day under a full load, I'd rather have less ram in order to extend my battery life.
Bbbut .... it's got: " the same amount of RAM found in a 13-inch top-spec M2 MacBook Pro" ... in a phone. Just the schadenfreude you get from shoving that fact into the face of every Apple hipster you meet should make that phone worth buying.
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Not clear if the power used by extra RAM is more than the power used to shuffle things into and out of memory (virtual memory). Some things release memory when there is memory pressure, and then re-render the UI when you switch back to them. Again, not immediately clear if that uses more battery than powering some extra RAM.
If they are smart they could also disable most of that RAM when it is not needed, and only enable it when playing a memory hungry game.
Re:Opposite of what's needed. (Score:4, Informative)
FWIW, mobile OSes don't use virtual memory, they just terminate apps when they need to make space (kinda like the Linux OOM [kernel.org]). If you need to launch it again, it launches from disk and loads any persistent state that it had as well. This is a lot more efficient that swapping to VM.
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I'm not ram-limited for things I want to do on my phone, I'm battery limited.
No one is RAM limited. This is a truly daft product. Android is perfectly functional even on phones with 1/4 of the RAM.
TARDIS? (Score:1)
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Hard corners? (Score:2)
it does not look comfortable to have to wrap your fingers around those hard corners
What?!? I've never had an issue wrapping my fingers around "hard corners".
Wake me when it runs Lineage/eOS/Calyx (Score:2)
The thought of a closed source firmware phone in this day and age is so much a non-starter. I won't touch a phone without an unlockable bootloader, at least unofficial support for one of the AOSP variants, and optimally a relockable bootloader. Bonus points for EDL support.
Imagine all the Chrome tabs! (Score:2)
I bet you could have up to eight or nine tabs open at once!