Database Develop

[Q] I have a question about the Ram for the G1

Ram for the G1 actually be? In the specifications of the G1 are all 192MB Ram
but in fact when testing with any program system information are reported as 92Mb, 100Mb other then gone?
Who can give me an explanation does not? Thank alot.

92 mb is for user usage (and honestly it's about 40 mb when you fully launch your phone).
100 mb is used by Android, GPU etc.

That is actually quite incorrect.
The "missing RAM" is allocated to various pieces of hardware.
For example, if you have a computer (including laptop) with an IGP graphics chip and you go into your bios settings, it usually has somewhere that you can configure the amount of MAIN MEMORY to allocate to the IGP. You would then notice that the total amount of memory available to the operating system is affected by changing this number.
16 MB is allocated to the GPU.
A *HUGE* chunk is allocated to the RADIO.
Some more is allocated to some other things.
A note about the "RADIO"... it isn't really just a RADIO. The MSM7201 chip in the phone actually has TWO ARM PROCESSORS in it. The "user" processor, and the "radio" processor. Each of these processors run different OPERATING SYSTEMS. The USER processor runs Android/Linux, the RADIO processor runs the proprietary radio operating system. These two systems are more-or-less INDEPENDENT with certain links to allow you to transfer data between them in order to communicate on the cell network.
In my opinion, listing the memory allocated to the radio as part of the total RAM is quite dishonest. This is compounded by the fact that their proprietary firmware is SO TERRIBLY FLAWED that it eats up a whole half the RAM of the thing. I am fairly convinced that the firmware developers at HTC must write their firmware in visual basic or some other horribly inefficient trash rather than writing it properly in assembly. There is NO justification for the radio to eat up more than about 8 MB, and yet it eats up nearly 100.

Very helpful explanation of how the phones are working internally. Thank you very much lbcoder!
Sent from my Htcclay's Superfly G1 using XDA App

lbcoder said:
That is actually quite incorrect.
The "missing RAM" is allocated to various pieces of hardware.
For example, if you have a computer (including laptop) with an IGP graphics chip and you go into your bios settings, it usually has somewhere that you can configure the amount of MAIN MEMORY to allocate to the IGP. You would then notice that the total amount of memory available to the operating system is affected by changing this number.
16 MB is allocated to the GPU.
A *HUGE* chunk is allocated to the RADIO.
Some more is allocated to some other things.
A note about the "RADIO"... it isn't really just a RADIO. The MSM7201 chip in the phone actually has TWO ARM PROCESSORS in it. The "user" processor, and the "radio" processor. Each of these processors run different OPERATING SYSTEMS. The USER processor runs Android/Linux, the RADIO processor runs the proprietary radio operating system. These two systems are more-or-less INDEPENDENT with certain links to allow you to transfer data between them in order to communicate on the cell network.
In my opinion, listing the memory allocated to the radio as part of the total RAM is quite dishonest. This is compounded by the fact that their proprietary firmware is SO TERRIBLY FLAWED that it eats up a whole half the RAM of the thing. I am fairly convinced that the firmware developers at HTC must write their firmware in visual basic or some other horribly inefficient trash rather than writing it properly in assembly. There is NO justification for the radio to eat up more than about 8 MB, and yet it eats up nearly 100.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
WOW! Thanks for this bit of really really useful and interesting info! I really didn't know how RAM is divided and just tried to write what I know/think.
SO! It's really interesting. There is not a way to rewrite this radio system? This one itself would free about 90 mb of RAM! It would be greater performance boost as all of this swaps, compcaches and other stuff. I thinks you know what I mean, my english is not so perfect.

raven_raven said:
WOW! Thanks for this bit of really really useful and interesting info! I really didn't know how RAM is divided and just tried to write what I know/think.
SO! It's really interesting. There is not a way to rewrite this radio system? This one itself would free about 90 mb of RAM! It would be greater performance boost as all of this swaps, compcaches and other stuff. I thinks you know what I mean, my english is not so perfect.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That would be the million dollar question, and the problem is that the thing is totally undocumented. And due to its age, it wouldn't make economic sense to reverse engineer it.
The next best option would be to disable the radio altogether. We could certainly write a simple bit of code that does nothing except pass everything off to the main processor. With that, and a little bit of USB MASTER mode and a USB UMTS modem.... might not be as pretty, but it could potentially do the same work, and would free up all the memory lost to the radio.

This is quite fantastic. Too bad that I won't posses coding skills needed to do that in next 15 years .
No one tried to do that? It is really fantstic vision, to free up about 100 mb of RAM! Man, G1 would totally have a second life.
Something tells me that it is impossible or nearly impossible to do this, I mean ppl would sacrifice 3D graphics for 10 mb of RAM (and someone had to write kernel doing that), and yet, when there is 10 times better profit, no one took the challenge.

Very interesting topic. In my opinion programming skills are not really the limiting factor, but documentation and especially architectural documentation of the phone is.
Independently of skills and time, I would not even know where to get the required information. Additionally there is the need for equipment (JTAG, etc.) due to the bricking risks. Unfortunately at the moment I can see only a very few guys here in the forum having that knowledge and most likely they do not have the time to concern about this.
Sent from my Htcclay's Superfly G1 using XDA App

AndDiSa said:
Very interesting topic. In my opinion programming skills are not really the limiting factor, but documentation and especially architectural documentation of the phone is.
Independently of skills and time, I would not even know where to get the required information. Additionally there is the need for equipment (JTAG, etc.) due to the bricking risks. Unfortunately at the moment I can see only a very few guys here in the forum having that knowledge and most likely they do not have the time to concern about this.
Sent from my Htcclay's Superfly G1 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No... it really is just programming skills. The part of the radio that we would be messing with is the code run on the ARM4 (I think its a 4... might be a 5), and just long enough to hand off to the ARM6. THAT part is very well documented. What isn't documented is the actual radio circuit and how to interface with that from the ARM4.
We're talking literally about just a few lines of assembly and throwing redboot at the ARM6 instead of the SPL.

[Q] How much RAM?

How much RAM does the Captivate really have? Reason I ask is my friend's Droid Incredible constantly has about 270-280MB free, even when he was on 2.1. My Captivate has about 150MB free after doing a task kill. I thought these were supposed to have 512MB of RAM, but this post says that the new Samsung Continuum has the same 336MB as the Samsung Fascinate. So, who knows for sure, with rock solid concrete proof that these phones have 512MB??
"The device looks to have the exact same 1 GHz Hummingbird processor, 336 MB of RAM, and Super AMOLED display as the already released Fascinate (we assume the camera and battery are going to be the same as well). "
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/09/30/new-hi-res-images-info-on-verizons-samsung-continuum/

From what I have read. The cappy has 512 but can't use all of it till froyo. 2.1 can't see all 512.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

derek4484 said:
How much RAM does the Captivate really have? Reason I ask is my friend's Droid Incredible constantly has about 270-280MB free, even when he was on 2.1. My Captivate has about 150MB free after doing a task kill. I thought these were supposed to have 512MB of RAM, but this post says that the new Samsung Continuum has the same 336MB as the Samsung Fascinate. So, who knows for sure, with rock solid concrete proof that these phones have 512MB??
"The device looks to have the exact same 1 GHz Hummingbird processor, 336 MB of RAM, and Super AMOLED display as the already released Fascinate (we assume the camera and battery are going to be the same as well). "
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/09/30/new-hi-res-images-info-on-verizons-samsung-continuum/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You are trying to hard.
Check out the official specs on samsungs web site:
http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/cell-phones/SGH-I897ZKAATT-features
If you don't believe that, then i don't know what to tell you.

alphadog00 said:
You are trying to hard.
Check out the official specs on samsungs web site:
http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/cell-phones/SGH-I897ZKAATT-features
If you don't believe that, then i don't know what to tell you.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ok, so it says 512MB of RAM. Well why cant we access the whole 512MB?? People were just saying "well 2.1 cant access all of it", which was garbage. My friend's droid incredible on 2.1 accessed all 512MB of its RAM. Now that Froyo is out for Captivate, its own built in task manager says it only has 304MB of RAM.
So, how am I trying hard? And what am I trying hard to do? I'm just wanting to know a solid answer. Where the EFF is the rest of the 512MB of RAM that these phones supposedly have? I regret buying a samjunk phone every day. Should have never wasted a dime on Samjunk.

Take it back; sell it; get rid of it then.
No one forced you to buy it or keep it.
The spec sheet says it has 512MB of RAM - some speculate that some of it used as video memory; other mentions say there is a RAM disk taking up space.
I have many apps open and running and i have not had a problem with running out of memory - so I am not to worried about what is available.

The initramfs uses a few MB - not much, single digits. The stock kernels also include ramdisk support and set up 8 8KiB ramdisks iirc. None of this accounts for the amount "missing", but space reserved for two or three screen-sized buffers, and for texture memory, etc might explain it. I have no idea where people get this idea that eclair kernels can't support 512MB.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

Unhelpful said:
The initramfs uses a few MB - not much, single digits. The stock kernels also include ramdisk support and set up 8 8KiB ramdisks iirc. None of this accounts for the amount "missing", but space reserved for two or three screen-sized buffers, and for texture memory, etc might explain it. I have no idea where people get this idea that eclair kernels can't support 512MB.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you. Educated answer. I know it has a 512MB chip in it, I dont think anybody is disputing that. What I was wanting to know or figure out is where is the missing RAM? From 512 to 304 is a good bit missing. So out of the 304MB the OS takes up about 160-180, that leaves us with about 120-140ish for program memory. To me, it doesnt make much sense to put 512 in a phone then hide almost half of it from programs. I demo'ed a Moto Droid last November for a month and it came with 256MB and after doing a task kill it would have about the same as these Galaxy S phones do. My guess is that some of the system ram is being reserved for video ram, or other's have speculated that there is a ram disk in there. Maybe a combination of both, vram and ram disk. I think its wrong for samsung to advertise "512MB RAM" to compete with the likes of N1, Droid incredible, EVO 4G, all of which have a true 512MB, but our phones have a large portion of that 512, thats not accessible. It'd be a lot more honest if they advertised 304MB.

Actually 128 MB of the RAM is dedicated to the gpu. I don't know specifics but I'm guess this is part of the reason why the galaxy blows everything else away in gaming. It is a little dissapointing but whatever. I feel the same way bout it as everyone else.
Sent from my SCH-I500 using XDA App

Anybody checked how does it look in i9000 or other GalaxyS-family phones?

Tear-downs have revealed that the phone does have 3 different chips that add up to 512 mb. Unfortunately a sizable portion is reserved for an unknown reason.

Has anybody been able to get a solid answer about where the missing 208MB of RAM is? Is it a ramdisk, is it video ram, is it a little of both? Who knows? Samsung knows but they wont admit that it doesnt have 512MB.
I've emailed samsung customer service several times explaining that my phone system information says 304MB RAM. They just reply, "Captivate does indeed have 512MB of RAM. Thank you for your inquiry.... blah blah blah."
It does have a 512MB chip in it, but what's it being used for, is what I'd like to know. N1 doesnt have this problem. Droid incredible doesnt have this problem. Droid X doesnt, etc. The G2 does, its advertised as 512MB but when you do system info on it, it has 380MB.

I just spoke to samsung level 5, its top secret and they will never disclose the answer! Muahahaha
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

itsjustaphone said:
I just spoke to samsung level 5, its top secret and they will never disclose the answer! Muahahaha
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
lol!
As much as I would also like to know where the rest of the ram goes, it doesn't matter so much when we dominate the quadrant scores with a small tweak
EDIT-forgot link: http://smartphonebenchmarks.com/

ThisWasATriumph said:
Tear-downs have revealed that the phone does have 3 different chips that add up to 512 mb. Unfortunately a sizable portion is reserved for an unknown reason.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Could u please elaborate this? Or atleast could u pls link to that site?

[Q] how much RAM are you seeing in Froyo (2.2)?

it seems like i'm still showing ~300MB total RAM (90MB free) with the leaked Captivate Froyo rom. i'm using an app called "Android System Info". should i not be seeing closer to the 512MB mark?

Same around 300....But I don't think I will be multitasking to the extent where I will need 500MB. I close BG apps routinely I am not using.......to save data.
I usually keep all Email syncing on, Latitude and sync FB as needed.

The amount of ram its the same in froyo. I tried android system info and same results. Try using the built in task manager in your apps. I have a feeling its more accurate than asi. I'm showing much better ram usage with built in task manager. 190-230 free on froyo opposed to 50-120 free with 2.1.
Oh yeah you can just push and hold your home button and then hit task manager on the multi tasker.
Cognition Froyo 2.2 Rooted-Sideloaded-RyanZA's OCLF and Screaming Fast
Sent from my SAMSUNG - Cognition using Tapatalk

304 total. :-/

ATT might have the RAM locked at a lower number so we do not meet the requirements for Android 3.0. That way when everyone starts pissing and moaning when they don't release it, they can say sorry...
Or they saved some money and put in less RAM in the U.S. models. I don't have the box or spec sheet in front of me but I do not recall ATT ever saying the Captivate has 512 MB RAM. Everyone just assumed it because the Galaxy S and other variants do.
I never had an Android device before, does it show physical RAM or addressable? What does the Intl. Galaxy S show? If it is the same as us then I guess we can't complain as much.
Perhaps the badass GPU in our phones uses shared RAM? Or maybe the address space is limited for some reason.

Bjd223 said:
ATT might have the RAM locked at a lower number so we do not meet the requirements for Android 3.0. That way when everyone starts pissing and moaning when they don't release it, they can say sorry...
Or they saved some money and put in less RAM in the U.S. models. I don't have the box or spec sheet in front of me but I do not recall ATT ever saying the Captivate has 512 MB RAM. Everyone just assumed it because the Galaxy S and other variants do.
I never had an Android device before, does it show physical RAM or addressable? What does the Intl. Galaxy S show? If it is the same as us then I guess we can't complain as much.
Perhaps the badass GPU in our phones uses shared RAM? Or maybe the address space is limited for some reason.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Samsung says it has 512 mb
http://http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/cell-phones/SGH-I897ZKAATT-features
Mac

Eclair is incapable of seeing more than 304 MB, and the leaked Froyo is still just a leak and not an official release. Just sit back and relax. If the official Froyo does not utilize all 512, then we'll have a reason to complain...

I've read somewhere around here that we will never see all 512mb of ram, because 128mb of that ram is dedicated to video... no sure how true it all is though.. my 2 cents

The phone only has 304MB available to the OS as RAM. The rest is reserved for some other function such as ramdisk or vram, or maybe both. I've emailed samsung numerous times but they wont even admit that. They just reply simply, "The Captivate does indeed have 512MB of RAM.... blah blah blah, etc etc etc." Getting a straight answer out of Samsung is like drinking soup with a corkscrew, just not possible. Its like trying to find out if JH7 had a GPS fix or not. They wont say definitively whether it did or didnt.

Heads Up For Devs (Next big thing)?

Now that the lag fixes have made strong progress and Froyo's source is almost here, there's one final thing that can be fixed about the SGS: compared to other phones, it's got quite a bit of less USABLE RAM.
Luckily, a cool dev in the i9000 forum has been messing with the kernel and figuring out how to free up more RAM. He's at 356 MB freed up (non-stable) thus far, and about 340 MB stable. This is up from 304 MB by default!!
Take a look if you haven't already. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=816229
Thanks to all devs for their hard-work, and I hope this helps you out in some way.

this requires board configuration files which are only available in source, not useful to us until we have source.

has anyone figured out if the 200 some odd megs of missing RAM are used by the GPU? Or does it have its own dedicated RAM?

Kaik541 said:
this requires board configuration files which are only available in source, not useful to us until we have source.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So you're saying we need the Captivate source files specifically? Because it works just fine for i9000 SGS.
gunnyman said:
has anyone figured out if the 200 some odd megs of missing RAM are used by the GPU? Or does it have its own dedicated RAM?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The thread details some of it. Apparently Samsung's programmers were lazy and it dedicates quite a bit of RAM for GPU purposes (but doesn't dynamically allocate it based on usage... so that RAM just sits there useless when you're not doing video-intensive applications) and some of it is also for the radio/modem.

Disgustipated said:
So you're saying we need the Captivate source files specifically? Because it works just fine for i9000 SGS.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yes, unless you know how to make a captivate froyo kernel without sources and aren't sharing (don't point to xcalibur's kernel, that's an i9000 kernel, not a captivate one)

Still interesting stuff though. Looks like we'll be able to recover at least 20-30 MB of RAM from the GPU. Perhaps more once it gets sorted where each and every drop of that original 512 MB is going.

Would be cool if that is what CM6 was waiting for....
that would yield huge performance increases i'd imagine.

iamamp3pimp said:
Would be cool if that is what CM6 was waiting for....
that would yield huge performance increases i'd imagine.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No it would not, having 140-150MB up from 120-130MB free RAM while sitting on your home screen and running your applications will NOT give your a huge or otherwise performance increase. FREE RAM means it's not being used! this is not a desktop where it uses a lot of swap when running on a low RAM system. the hardware on these devices NEED the alloted RAM to operate correctly. Samsung was not simply "lazy" mess around with the kernel and free up a few more MB RAM and you might find a few VERY RAM intensive applications that perhaps run smoother or what ever but then you are reducing performance of all the hardware features that make your device so nice, I.E the Camera, Radios, GPU. the effort is not worth any possible tiny free RAM boost you might get. why does everyone care so much about the free RAM anyway. I know a LOT of folks are going to jump in here now and ramble on about how it's a big deal and how samsung screwed it up or whatnot, but making those hardware features dynamicly allot RAM would mean that the kernel would have to some VERY efficient prioritizing of hardware/software RAM usage in order to have the device run currently in whole. It makes more sense to me to just do what they did and lock the amount of RAM to those hardware features that would allow them to best operate without your phone radio not working right or your camera not being able to record in 720 because you forgot you had some application open in the background and RAM prioritizing isn't as perfect as it should be. the device runs FINE! Also so this isn't confusing to anyone who might think that I think we want to make the RAM dynamic, I understand it'sstatic thing but the same things apply, those hardware features would just be stock without the correct ammount of RAM all the time.

Why 512MB of RAM means no Bionic for me

I've seen a lot of discussion on various Android/Droid forums on the web over the past month or two about the Bionic, and it having 512MB of RAM. A lot of people don't seem to mind, and some people have even said it doesn't matter because it's DDR2, which is faster than regular DDR.
Well, 512MB of RAM is not enough for a dual-core phone you plan to use for 2 years or more. Here's why, in a rather lengthy post that I also put on MyDroidWorld the other night. I've been on the XDA forums for a long time, though I don't post very frequently and I'm curious to see what people will think of my admittedly long post. So, here is why I think people should think long and hard about whether to buy the Bionic when it does come out, assuming it still ships with 512MB of RAM.
Caching.
Ok - let me explain. The single most important factor in performance of a computer is having enough RAM. When a computer runs out of RAM, it starts to use what's called a page file. It's basically a file on your hard drive that acts as additional RAM. Now, DDR3-1600 speed RAM transfers data at 12.8 gigabytes per second. Phenomenally fast. It also has a reaction time of around 5 nanoseconds, also ridiculously fast. When your operating system has to start using the page file because the physical RAM is full, the performance hit is EXTRAORDINARY. Even the best hard disk drives (not counting SSDs) like the latest Raptor from Western Digital cap out at around 155 megabytes per second for reading and writing, and it has a peak latency of 7 milliseconds for reaction time. 1 nanosecond is 1 million milliseconds, which makes the DDR3 RAM over a MILLION times faster reacting than the hard drive, and the transfer rate of the RAM over 80 times faster than the transfer rate of the hard drive.
In real-world terms, it's like you're talking about an ant versus a Porsche 911 Turbo. Most old computers that have long pauses or hang for several seconds doing even basic tasks, it's because they don't have enough RAM and it's caching stuff between the hard drive and the RAM.
Now, whenever Android runs out of RAM, (same with any operating system) it has to start using its page file, which means it starts using this monstrously slow flash memory as RAM. It's like merging onto a freeway that is gridlocked with traffic when you were going hundreds of miles per hour. The flash memory is a lot slower than the Raptor hard drive for data transfer rates, but it has a read time a lot faster; the best-performing ones are generally under 1 microsecond. 1 microsecond is a thousand times slower than 1 nanosecond. The write times are closer to hard drives, though; generally less than 1 millisecond, so like 10x faster than a hard drive but still 100,000 times slower reaction time to writing data than the RAM is.
What this means is, when your permanent storage is flash-based, it has a much faster reaction time than a hard drive but it's still dog-slow compared to RAM; so when Android runs out of RAM, it caches to the page file on the flash memory, and you'll have the same slowdown effect as you do on an old POS computer, but it's not as noticeable because flash memory reacts faster than disk-based hard drives.
The point of all of this is that, 1GB of DDR1 memory on a phone is FAR better than 512MB of DDR2 memory. The 1GB will prevent you from hitting that metaphorical brick wall of caching data to your flash memory when the 512MB won't. We already use 400MB, or more, of our 512MB of RAM on our existing phones just by turning it on and having a couple of widgets/services in the background above & beyond the stock ones. How do you expect to take advantage significantly higher-end applications and games, which also means (for games, primarily) that they take up more RAM, as well?
You can't have higher-quality graphics without needing more RAM, so when that new version of Angry Birds comes out this fall or something that requires two cores and looks amazing, but uses 250MB of RAM to run instead of the 80MB or whatever the regular one uses now, what do you think has to happen? That's right. Android has to cache that much extra data to your flash memory so it can unload it from the RAM, freeing the necessary space to load Angry Birds HD. This causes more of a delay as it's writing data, and will cause extra choppiness, etc. Another thing to keep in mind is that, as resolutions increase, so do the texture sizes for all applications and widgets that you use, assuming they support the new resolution. More size needed, which takes up more space in RAM.
Don't be fooled. When truly good and proper dual-core benchmarks come out, 1GB RAM dual-core phones will spank their 512MB RAM dual-core brethren for real-world performance in games, and other high-memory applications. Also, excessive caching greatly increases the chance of flash memory going bad. Not a common occurrence if it was fine when shipped, but still something to think about.
So, in summary, even though the performance hit from caching to flash memory isn't as bad as caching to hard disk drives, it's still a tremendous slowdown and it will matter for dual-core phones way more than for single-core ones. The average amount of RAM installed on dual-core desktop computers from Dell/HP/etc. was significantly higher than what the average was for the previous single-core generations were, and there are reasons for that. Primarily, the same reasons I just outlined. In simple terms, faster processors can do more things, which necessarily requires more RAM.
Sorry for the wall of text, I tried to be more concise but it kind of got away from me. I'm not buying a Bionic because it has 512MB of RAM. After owning it a year, it'll be having performance issues on top-end dual-core-required games that run just fine on phones like the Atrix.

I'm sorry because I know this is probably going to come across the wrong way, but WOW, you spent a lot of time writing that up, and too much time for me to read it alll, especially considering Motorola has pulled back on the Bionic and it's receiving "enhancements". I guess what I'm saying is why all the speculation/conjecture until we know the revised specs? Maybe it'll land with 8GB of DDR 6 RAM.

I'm hoping Motorola gives Verizon a phone that is higher end than the Atrix. Afterall Verizon has done much more than ATT in the way of supporting Moto..when they needed it. Anxious to see what Big Red winds up with.
Sent from my ERIS using XDA Premium App

I disagree that ram is the single most important factor of performance of a computer.
hard drives are the biggest bottleneck in a computer. this is why I use a vertex 3 ssd.
Sent from my PC36100 using XDA Premium App

gemro311 said:
I'm hoping Motorola gives Verizon a phone that is higher end than the Atrix. Afterall Verizon has done much more than ATT in the way of supporting Moto..when they needed it. Anxious to see what Big Red winds up with.
Sent from my ERIS using XDA Premium App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I concur, really hope VZW pushes for a premier device

I disagree. Android isn't expanding as an OS at some breakneck pace and 512MB is definitely suitable for the near future. 1GB is absolutely not necessary for great performance in a phone. RAM is a bottleneck, but it is not something that magically allows for better performance if the device isn't hitting the pagefile anyway.
The way that Android manages applications will allow 512MB phones to be relevant for some time. The Bionic will be a solid phone for the next year, but there will always be something bigger and better next year. Phones aren't future-proof.

I was just checking out this thread and wanted to say maybe the reason that the atrix comes with 1gb of ram is because of the extra contraption that you can buy along with. It looks like a netbook but is not very well performing and who would even care to rely on it for anything I don't know.

gemro311 said:
I'm hoping Motorola gives Verizon a phone that is higher end than the Atrix. Afterall Verizon has done much more than ATT in the way of supporting Moto..when they needed it. Anxious to see what Big Red winds up with.
Sent from my ERIS using XDA Premium App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I certainly hope Motorola makes the required improvements, but you also need to keep in mind Verizon approves and in many if not all cases specs the phones they want. They chose the specs, they had to live with the specs. I think once they saw what was coming they figured it was no longer premiere and wanted changes made.
Regardless of why its been pulled back the fact that it was is good, but if its going to take 4-5 months to get it out the door they should have just scrapped it altogether.

E30kid said:
I disagree. Android isn't expanding as an OS at some breakneck pace and 512MB is definitely suitable for the near future. 1GB is absolutely not necessary for great performance in a phone. RAM is a bottleneck, but it is not something that magically allows for better performance if the device isn't hitting the pagefile anyway.
The way that Android manages applications will allow 512MB phones to be relevant for some time. The Bionic will be a solid phone for the next year, but there will always be something bigger and better next year. Phones aren't future-proof.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, wait for Ice Cream and we'll see. Since the future Android version will also run in tablets, it is likely that it will have huge memory requirements.
By the way, my Acer Liquid A1 can't be officially upgraded to Froyo because it only has 256Mb. Later Liquid models with 512Mb are upgradeable. At the time I bought it, 512Mb seemed unnecessary because the Nexus One operating system only supported 256Mb, having the other 256Mb wasted. This was only 12 months ago...

galaxyjeff said:
I was just checking out this thread and wanted to say maybe the reason that the atrix comes with 1gb of ram is because of the extra contraption that you can buy along with. It looks like a netbook but is not very well performing and who would even care to rely on it for anything I don't know.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think you are on to something here. I think I read somewhere that the atrix only uses 512 mb when not connected to the dock. I have the inspire which has 768 mb, and I came from the captivate which was 512 mb, and I done know if is the ram or what but this phone performs way better than the captivate. Even when I bought the inspire, right out the box stock, preformed much better than a captivate overclocked with an ext4 filesystem kernel. Not that this is empirical evidence, but hey.
Sent from my HTC Desire HD using XDA Premium App

cryptiq said:
I'm sorry because I know this is probably going to come across the wrong way, but WOW, you spent a lot of time writing that up, and too much time for me to read it alll, especially considering Motorola has pulled back on the Bionic and it's receiving "enhancements". I guess what I'm saying is why all the speculation/conjecture until we know the revised specs? Maybe it'll land with 8GB of DDR 6 RAM.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I lol'd. But seriously 512 MB of RAM is more than enough... It's a PHONE not a high end desktop system. I play tons of games on my x2 and with alot of crap in the backround open, and I notice zero performance hits. If you are spending all day monitoring your RAM on your phone and trying to measure FPS loss, load time differences, etc. I suggest that you try to pick up a new hobby ASAP, OCDing will be the end of you. Best of luck!
Edit: I wouldn't worry about it either! Bionic probably won't come out anyways, and if it does, another phone with 1GB to satisfy your OCD probably will be out by then.

As of now, I feel ALL future top tier smart phones need to come equipped with at least 1GB of DDR2. The G2x, for example, will most likely have issues running a custom ice cream rom. And people will be upset.. especially after putting up with all of the other various problems that particular phone has.

OP, I don't agree entirely with your explanation of the use of caching by the OS - for all 3 major computer OSes, no matter how much excess RAM you have, they will start caching data to the hard drive, whether you like it or not. Obviously if you run out of RAM, it has to do so, but it'll even do it long before you've hit that cap - just because it determines an application has gone "inactive". Now I haven't read up on Android enough to know whether this is 100% true for it, too, but considering it's running a linux kernel, I would imagine so. So just like the 8GB of RAM in my desktop doesn't necessarily help for everyday computing needs, 1GB vs 512mb on the Bionic may not make a huge difference.

raptordrew said:
OP, I don't agree entirely with your explanation of the use of caching by the OS - for all 3 major computer OSes, no matter how much excess RAM you have, they will start caching data to the hard drive, whether you like it or not. Obviously if you run out of RAM, it has to do so, but it'll even do it long before you've hit that cap - just because it determines an application has gone "inactive". Now I haven't read up on Android enough to know whether this is 100% true for it, too, but considering it's running a linux kernel, I would imagine so. So just like the 8GB of RAM in my desktop doesn't necessarily help for everyday computing needs, 1GB vs 512mb on the Bionic may not make a huge difference.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i beg to differ
my captivate; even though its a single core...is still quite capable at most everyday tasks...only thing lacking is the RAM
my phone will slow to a crawl after entering twitter, switching to pulse and then going back to my homescreen....
not to mention my launcher keeps getting killed by android as it keeps running out of RAM

droid_does said:
i beg to differ
my captivate; even though its a single core...is still quite capable at most everyday tasks...only thing lacking is the RAM
my phone will slow to a crawl after entering twitter, switching to pulse and then going back to my homescreen....
not to mention my launcher keeps getting killed by android as it keeps running out of RAM
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have to lol at this one. Absolutely none of those issues have to do with amount of RAM. In fact the launcher problem has nothing to do with RAM at all.
Sent from my ADR6400L using XDA App

While I appreciate other people who have the same amount of passion for phones as I do, I just have two words to say about anyone saying phones with 512 mb ram will not get Ice Cream Sandwich. Nexus S.
Sent from my ADR6400L using XDA App

mb02 said:
I have to lol at this one. Absolutely none of those issues have to do with amount of RAM. In fact the launcher problem has nothing to do with RAM at all.
Sent from my ADR6400L using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
it does as android keeps killing it to free up more RAM to use......

droid_does said:
it does as android keeps killing it to free up more RAM to use......
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yea the task manager is killing the apps to keep ram freed up, as in stopping unused processes etc. That's just the aggressive working of the management software that would run just the same if you even had 8GB of ram.
Sent from my ADR6400L using XDA App

timothymilla said:
While I appreciate other people who have the same amount of passion for phones as I do, I just have two words to say about anyone saying phones with 512 mb ram will not get Ice Cream Sandwich. Nexus S.
Sent from my ADR6400L using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Remember when everyone thought Gingerbread would require a 1GHz processor as a system requirement, which was later debunked?
http://www.talkandroid.com/23041-so...ngerbread-update-due-to-1ghz-cpu-requirement/
Nobody can say what will and will not get updated for sure, although I will venture to say that it's HIGHLY likely the Nexus S will be getting 2.4, you're right.

zetsumeikuro said:
I lol'd. But seriously 512 MB of RAM is more than enough... It's a PHONE not a high end desktop system. I play tons of games on my x2 and with alot of crap in the backround open, and I notice zero performance hits. If you are spending all day monitoring your RAM on your phone and trying to measure FPS loss, load time differences, etc. I suggest that you try to pick up a new hobby ASAP, OCDing will be the end of you. Best of luck!
Edit: I wouldn't worry about it either! Bionic probably won't come out anyways, and if it does, another phone with 1GB to satisfy your OCD probably will be out by then.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
512 mb is not enough for a dual core 4G phone it just isnt. the thunderbolt has 768 mb and its only single core and 4G and let me tell you it would be way faster with the 1024 mb of ram i cant imagine how laggy the bionic would be if you start doing anything with it! the 512 ram will be ate up in no time! i sure hope verizon reconsiders and adds more ram or i probably wont use this device as my daily phone either keep the thunderbolt with more ram which is sad cause it has been out for awhile now and the droid x also has 512 ram and it has been out for a year and they cant make improvements?? and they are going to want $299+++ for this phone ON CONTRACT! it better have more than 512 ram or it aint worth a lick! rip this phone open and put my own ram in it!