Japanese Galaxy S III to Pack 2GB of RAM, Dual-core CPU
How much RAM does your smartphone have?
Dual-core processors in smartphones are almost the norm these days and quad-core CPUs are fast becoming common, too. Similarly, manufacturers are also stepping up the amount of RAM they're packing into their smartphones. The newly announced Galaxy S III boasts a whopping 1GB of RAM. However, the Japanese version of the Galaxy S III is going to have even more.
Word on the street is that the Japanese version of the Galaxy S III, which is set to launch on Japan's NTT DoMoCo network this summer, will actually have double the RAM. Though we haven't been given a reason for this massive bump in RAM for Japan, it's likely that Samsung jacked things up after LG announced the LTE2, which also boasts 2GB of RAM. The LTE2 was unveiled on the same day as the Galaxy S III, so it's possible Samsung wants to match HTC in the Japanese market.
Having 2GB of RAM isn't the only different between the GSIII launching in Europe at the end of this month, either. The Japanese model will also sub in a Qualcomm S4 dual-core CPU instead of Sammy's own Exynos processor. The United States is also expected to get a dual-core flavour of the Galaxy S III, a result of quad-core chips not being compatible with American LTE networks.
Which would you prefer, dual-core with 2GB of RAM, or quad-core with 1GB of RAM? It's a tough one!

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
Phone
Checkbook
Texting
Chatting
Turn-By-Turn Navigaion/GPS
Media Streaming
The occasional tower defense game
It should be
so it's possible Samsung wants to match LG in the Japanese market
Na...you know Apple doesn't do anything too techy. ...though the iPhone V commeth.
I would recommend a dumb phone you then.
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...
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
Probably more to do with how the SoC's been designed. Or EMI with quad cores? idk.
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.
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.
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?
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?)
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Thought so.
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.