Japanese Galaxy S III to Pack 2GB of RAM, Dual-core CPU

[JMcEntegart]

How much RAM does your smartphone have?

Japanese Galaxy S III to Pack 2GB of RAM, Dual-core CPU : Read more

 

[jacobdrj]

Which one performs better on my day-to-day tasks?

Phone
Checkbook
Texting
Chatting
Turn-By-Turn Navigaion/GPS
Media Streaming
The occasional tower defense game

 

[rahulkadukar]

so it's possible Samsung wants to match HTC in the Japanese market

It should be

so it's possible Samsung wants to match LG in the Japanese market

 

[fakie]

I'd like a phone that lasts a week on a full charge with moderate usage..

 

[del35]

Glad Apple didn't do this, or we would be hearing about Apple's magical innovations Ad nauseam in the narrowly owned elite propaganda rags that constitute the US media.

 

[halcyon]

Why do all the beautiful Japanese always get the cool stuff? I know their women are hot but sheesh! :/

 

[halcyon]

[citation][nom]del35[/nom]Glad Apple didn't do this, or we would be hearing about Apple's magical innovations Ad nauseam in the narrowly owned elite propaganda rags that constitute the US media.[/citation]
Na...you know Apple doesn't do anything too techy. ...though the iPhone V commeth.

 

[classzero]

[citation][nom]fakie[/nom]I'd like a phone that lasts a week on a full charge with moderate usage..[/citation]

I would recommend a dumb phone you then.

 

[jacobdrj]

[citation][nom]classzero[/nom]I would recommend a dumb phone you then.[/citation]
I lament the days of my old Nokia 1100 which would last a week on 1 charge, had great reception, the best alarm clock EVER, and to top it off, an LED flashlight...

Only reason I dumped the phone was because the net10 plan I was on was getting to be too expensive. Moved to Boost Mobile unlimited, and seriously missed that flashlight...

 

[nebun]

so why aren't quad core smartphones compatible US LTE systems?...cpu instructions have nothingto do with how info is sent and received....the developers need to stop being lazy and get to work

 

[razor512]

100% would go for dual core and 2GB RAM

If you install a CPU monitor, you will see that you rarely have a high level of CPU usage, but android uses a lot of memory, on a 1GB RAM device, android uses around 400MB of that memory just on it's self (for comparison, windows 2000 and windows XP use about 40MB or RAM on them self, and windows 7 uses around 500-1024MB on it's self)

Android is a resource hog when it comes to RAM and 2GB will be more beneficial than 2 extra cores

 

[ojas]

[citation][nom]nebun[/nom]so why aren't quad core smartphones compatible US LTE systems?...cpu instructions have nothingto do with how info is sent and received....the developers need to stop being lazy and get to work[/citation]
Probably more to do with how the SoC's been designed. Or EMI with quad cores? idk.

 

[damianrobertjones]

Imagine what a highly optimised mobile OS would do with a dual core cpu and 2Gb ram! (As in WP7)

 

[killerclick]

So what is SGS III? Just the design, while the actual device can be anything?

 

[killerclick]

[citation][nom]damianrobertjones[/nom]Imagine what a highly optimised mobile OS would do with a dual core cpu and 2Gb ram! (As in WP7)[/citation]

That phone would fail to take more than 2% of the global market in 14 months.

Besides, WP 7 doesn't support multicore, as far as I know.

 

[Guest]

It's not that "quad cores" aren't LTE-compatible, it's that specifically Exynos and Tegra 3 SoCs are not compatible. The Qualcomm S4 has the LTE baseband integrated into the SoC. This article grossly over-simplifies the performance of smartphone SoCs, which is disappointing for a site with general competent tech product reviews.

The Qualcomm S4, which is most likely what the US version of the SGSIII will run and the "dual-core" CPU the article refers to, has been shown to outperform the "quad-core" (it's really quint-core, but who cares) in several benchmarks. Do a google search and you'll see 5-10 sites that will corroborate this.

Making broad statements about about dual- vs quad-core SoCs in smartphones is as pointless as comparing an i7 to a Bulldozer-based AMD CPU based purely on core count.

 

[asterisx]

[citation][nom]Razor512[/nom]100% would go for dual core and 2GB RAMIf you install a CPU monitor, you will see that you rarely have a high level of CPU usage, but android uses a lot of memory, on a 1GB RAM device, android uses around 400MB of that memory just on it's self (for comparison, windows 2000 and windows XP use about 40MB or RAM on them self, and windows 7 uses around 500-1024MB on it's self)Android is a resource hog when it comes to RAM and 2GB will be more beneficial than 2 extra cores[/citation]

And WP7 uses just 10MB of RAM.

I am a android fan, but there are certain things android isn't good at(efficient at). One is resource usage. If my phone ever slows down, it does because of low memory. Android is improving(like GPU rendering the GUI) but still there are lot of phones still running froyo and previous versions of android. Let say the total no. of android phones are X. Out of these, the no. of phones running os prior to ICS are .99X. Out of these .99X phone IMHO about 70% are capable of running ICS. So that's nearly .70X or nearly current 70% of android phones are capable of running ICS. If all of them get ICS and the next future versions get updated in the same ratio. We would be treating android and comparing android on the basis of its latest version not on its array of os's. But such things I doubt would happen. Why would someone buy a new ICS phone, if he is already running flawlessly in his old phone?

 

[5teviewonders]

I'm sick of Samsung doing this to cut down on costs. I understand their reason for the dual core in US models but less ram? They also didn't bother putting an NFC chip in UK S2s. On top of that, everything that can't be bragged about on the specs sheet is cheap and shit. Cheap plastic, wifi's temperamental and connection's bad. I will not be getting another Samsung phone after my experience with the S2.

 

[razor512]

it is just insane how much RAM android uses, here is my tablet after a reboot (I only have a few icons and the Gmail widget on the desktop)

http://i.imgur.com/vltyp.png

More than half of the RAM is being taken by the OS (Android 4.0 )

The CPU usage is low, hovers around 0-1% when idle.

With resource usage like that, tablet makers are better off porting windows 2000 or XP over to the tablet (think of what you were able to get done on a computer running windows 2000 and around 256-384MB RAM. What happened to bring us to a point where a OS that can be considered less functional is using almost as much RAM as windows 7 (A desktop OS that is significantly more functional than android)

In fact, android uses more RAM than the desktop version of ubuntu 12.04 (how was google able to botch linux in suck a way to achieve that?)

 

[eddieroolz]

What can a quad core in a phone do better than a dual core?

---

Thought so.

 

[jwcalla]

[citation][nom]Razor512[/nom]but android uses a lot of memory, on a 1GB RAM device, android uses around 400MB of that memory just on it's self (for comparison, windows 2000 and windows XP use about 40MB or RAM on them self, and windows 7 uses around 500-1024MB on it's self)Android is a resource hog when it comes to RAM and 2GB will be more beneficial than 2 extra cores[/citation]

I think a lot of that is cached processes. Plus when an app is dismissed it tends to be left in memory so you can go back to it quicker. It's a lot quicker to pull an app from memory than the relatively much slower NAND flash. So in that sense, cached processes are really valuable. If the RAM is available, it really should be used. And that supports your argument that more RAM is preferable.

BTW my GB phone has about 200 MB (out of 384 MB) in use and my leaned-out CM9 ICS tablet about 285 MB (out of 1 GB), which is similar to your numbers when figuring it as percent of capacity. So it probably caches a certain percent of the available memory.

 

[jwcalla]

[citation][nom]razor512[/nom]it is just insane how much RAM android uses, here is my tablet after a reboot ... In fact, android uses more RAM than the desktop version of ubuntu 12.04 (how was google able to botch linux in suck a way to achieve that?)[/citation]

If you run free -m, it'll probably report memory usage / free as being substantially different than what Android is reporting in the Settings. I think this indicates that Android is grabbing and reserving a significant portion of the RAM. The kernel sees it as "in use" but it's not necessarily unavailable to applications. It could be reserved for the Java VM or some other mechanism.

 

[jwcalla]

[citation][nom]eddieroolz[/nom]What can a quad core in a phone do better than a dual core?[/citation]

Right now... not much, really. Maybe video decoding for cases where it has to be done on the CPU.

But there is a future for multi-core devices, and these vendors may be rolling these chips out now just to get experience with the process and iron out any issues.

E.g., the new Cortex A15 introduces a hypervisor. This will allow multiple operating systems to run on the device simultaneously (say, Android and Ubuntu, allowing you to make phone calls, etc. while using desktop Ubuntu w/ peripherals). In this case you could dole out 2 CPU cores per OS.

 

[dormantreign]

If all i can get in Canada is dual core, i'm jumping ship too iphones 4s.

 

[whysobluepandabear]

Neither. I want a better battery and efficiency - something they somehow cannot deliver.


Most flagship phones are already massively overkill for the measly tasks they're expected to do - so why are we pushing bigger and faster hardware, instead of quality and efficiency?