Originally published at: New smartphone has more RAM than a Macbook | Boing Boing
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Oh boy, more ram means longer battery life!
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I was just reading William Gibson’s groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Neuromancer recently. Near the beginning of the book the protagonist is trying to get out of a financial problem by fencing 5 Megabytes of stolen RAM. (Of course, in this cyberpunk dystopia no one carries mobile phones anyway.) How times have changed.
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Of course Bill Gates said that nobody will ever need more than 640K of RAM.
Work expands to fill the space available…
The people I know who could use that? AR addicts: If you want to play Pokemon Go, Ingress, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, The Walking Dead: Our World, etc., you’ll want all those games resident in memory at once so that you’re not waiting a half-minute for each context switch and grab that Magicarp, throw a link to make a field, and kill a zombie before moving to the next spot.
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Re: Desktop mode, I’ve used Samsung’s DeX. It’s OK. Not quite there yet. In a pinch I could get most of my work stuff running on it. RAM isn’t the real issue here, it’s the apps not being able to scale bigger than the phone’s aspect ratio, and the apps not being responsive like you’d expect from a Desktop app.
Still waiting for the dream of a desktop environment I can slide into my pocket. Alas, the dream of a Windows 10 phone is dead.
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'I’m not an Android user, so I have to ask: what can you even do on an Android phone that benefits from 18GB of RAM? ’
The walls must be pretty high in your garden if you can’t even visualize what’s on the other side. 
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meanwhile, in Switzerland…
https://www.fhgr.ch/en/specialist-areas/applied-future-technologies/davis-centre/pi-challenge/
Processors
2 AMD EPYC 7542 CPUs, 32 cores each
Memory (RAM)
1 TB
Disk space total
510 TB
HDDs
38 hard disk drives running at 7,200 rpm and with 16 TB each. 34 of these disks are used for swap space and 4 disks will hold the final Pi digits
SSDs
2 SSDs in a RAID configuration for storing the operating system
Although our installed RAM is very large compared to a regular desktop PC, it would only be enough to calculate Pi to a few 100 billion decimal places. To work around this limitation, the Pi calculation program stores a large portion of its memory on hard disk drives. This technique is called ‘swapping’ and is a method also employed by regular PCs, for example with Windows or Mac.
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Immediately I thought of things like photogrammetry, that you can do on a phone now, and absolutely would benefit from having that kind of power - or at least they would, if the phone apps didn’t just offload all the processing into the cloud. And that’s the problem - any kind of application where you could use that kind of RAM aren’t set up for it in their phone app versions. I assume you’d have to write your own apps for this to be really useful.
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'I’m not an Android user" if you use an iPhone, how terrible to have so much restrictions
And the Android core apps grow a little bigger to choke lesser phones. Again.
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If mobile devices have been meaningfully compared to supercomputers in the past, why not let them do real computing for a change?
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Given the brand I assume the answer to the question of the ram is “so we can play games” or possibly so we can sell it to gamers by using excess.
Yeah, on an M1 mac, the 16GB Ram option lets games use ultra textures.
Well… pay for it?
I mean, that’s the serious answer. For a certain subset of people, having more RAM in your phone has the same cachet that other people would attach to having more gold on their phone. It’s a commodity that costs a certain amount and therefore makes a concrete statement about your phone budget.
But it won’t make your phone faster, outside of very contrived benchmarks (if even then), because in almost all cases the bottleneck will be bus bandwidth, or cache size, or even CPU speed. If RAM isn’t the limiting factor on a 4GB phone, then quadrupling it won’t help, and will probably decrease performance per watt. In fact, Android may be smart enough to improve the performance of this phone by just switching off the excess RAM chips.
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You could install Termux and use it as a Linux workstation (not necessarily docked in desktop mode)
I mean, they sort of already are, what with the demands of mobile OSes. But you build apps to take advantage of the most common hardware profiles, not some weird outliers.
The problem is, if you’re making mobile games, you’re automatically building them with the lowest quality models and textures and shaders. You also aren’t going to add in optional, higher-quality assets because you don’t want to bloat the install size. (And you aren’t going to develop for that kind of RAM size, with bigger levels, etc. because the user base is too small for those phones at this point.)
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Pocket crypto miner.
Except he never actually said this.
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Right. A svelte android game is 7-8 GB; there’s no need to bump it to 70-80GB
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“Ups! Die Seite wurde nicht gefunden.“
Omit the trailing backslash and it works: https://www.fhgr.ch/en/specialist-areas/applied-future-technologies/davis-centre/pi-challenge/
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