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Samsung has announced the mass production of 12 Gb (1.5 GB) LPDDR4 DRAM chips on a 20nm process. The state-of-the-art was previously 8 Gb. The new DRAM chips could enable the production of smartphones with 6 gigabytes of RAM:
The production of 12Gb chips opens up the possibility of smartphones and tablets with 6GB of RAM using a four 12Gb chip DRAM package, as well as 3GB using just two chips in a package. A 6GB package would also only take up the same amount of space as existing 3GB packages which use 6Gb chips. The new 12Gb chips also end up being very slightly more than 30% faster than their 8Gb chips, with a per-pin speed of 4266Mbps which would give 34Gbps of bandwidth over a 64bit bus. With Samsung beginning mass production of this new memory it's only a matter of time before we start to see more devices move from 2GB to 3GB and from 4GB to 6GB of RAM.
There are several phones on the market with 4 GB of RAM, such as the Oppo Find 9, Xiaomi Mi Note Pro, ASUS ZenFone 2, Sony Xperia Z4, Lenovo K80, Huawei Ascend D8, and soon, Micromax's YU5050. These manufacturers could use 12 Gb chips to create phones with 6 GB of faster RAM without using additional chips.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Thursday September 10 2015, @01:09AM
Oh cool, now FaceSpace, Amazon, Netflix, Google!, the NSA and the rest can track even more of our activities.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday September 10 2015, @01:42AM
iPhone 6s and 6s Plus will probably have 2 GB of RAM, up from 1 GB just last year.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/07/02/leaked-foxconn-document-backs-12mp-camera-2gb-of-ram-for-iphone-6s [appleinsider.com]
All other things being equal, is a flagship smartphone with 6 GB of faster RAM that consumes less power better than 4 GB? Why wouldn't it be (other than a small price bump)?
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday September 10 2015, @09:48AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday September 10 2015, @12:42PM
The Foxconn document from July got the camera details right, so it should also be right about the 2 GB of RAM.
Apple A8 has 2 cores. Apple is known for making its mobile processors more powerful than other ARM chips, despite lower core counts. They also add less cores to new chips. So they may add a third core to the A9.
iPhone 6/6 Plus has 1 GB LPDDR3 RAM, so Apple could move to LPDDR4 for the new phones and save power, even when doubling to 2 GB.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @01:56PM
Is SRAM less power hungry (because it doesn't need refresh)? If so, maybe it would make more sense to put SRAM in the phone. Sure, you'll not get 6GB of it in your phone, but if in return you get a longer battery life time, the tradeoff would probably be worth if (moreover AFAIK SRAM is faster than DRAM, so that's yet another advantage).
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday September 10 2015, @03:48PM
Is SRAM less power hungry (because it doesn't need refresh)?
SRAM doesn't need refresh, but it is still volatile memory. DRAM is a leaky capacitor and so needs a refresh to charge the capacitor. SDRAM synchronises the refresh cycle with the read/write cycle to minimise latency. SRAM is just an array of flip-flops and is more power-hungry than DRAM. It's also a lot less dense (and area roughly corresponds to power, when talking about this kind of circuit).
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Funny) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday September 10 2015, @01:54AM
How does this compare to the 32GB microSD-cards that I load my music on to (FLAC, probably unnecessary, but why not, they only cost ten bucks at Walgreens)?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Thursday September 10 2015, @02:09AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @02:09PM
Well, it of course depends on the used metric. Let's see:
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hash14 on Thursday September 10 2015, @04:12AM
The key failing of modern phones isn't the lack of RAM - it's the fact that they don't have an interface. Prior to Steve Jobs fucking everything up, phones had physical keypads which made it possible to actually do things with them, like writing emails or even performing remote administration of a server. Now that we live in an age of aesthetics over utility, we're not allowed to do those nice things because these devices don't accept input anymore (unless you want to settle for shitty speech-to-text and other such systems which never work) - yes, it would be _nice_ if we could do those things once more, but we can't find a pretty way to package it so forget about it. The screens are gorgeous, but that only allows you to consume what they feed you[1]. Ultimately, all I have really found worth doing on these things, aside from making phone calls, is reading some RSS feeds or maybe opening a webpage. I can't think of anything else that they really enable (aside from government surveillance), and I don't think 50x more RAM is going to fix that.
[1] Oh right - that's all they're supposed to do in the first place.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Thursday September 10 2015, @04:13AM
I'll point out though that boosting memory capacities of servers and other computers though does sound quite compelling....
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @05:55AM
bluetooth keyboard
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @01:50PM
I tried it. But apart from the fact that now I can't get the blue colour off my teeth, my phone didn't recognize my typing. Oh, and my fingers went all wet. Not to mention that it simply looks silly if you try to type on your teeth. ;-)
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Thursday September 10 2015, @09:53PM
Security, unless you're okay with everyone in the room knowing your SSH hosts and root passwords...
(Score: 2) by Urlax on Thursday October 01 2015, @07:24AM
Since when can bluetooth be sniffed and remotely decrypted?
a lot of android phones have usb OTG as well as all cheap china tablets, so you can connect a usb keyboard to be safe.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Thursday October 01 2015, @11:11PM
As far as known vulnerabilities, here's an overview of some (see section 4.1): http://www.nist.gov/customcf/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=911133 [nist.gov] - it's basically what you would expect. Old protocols are no longer secure and susceptible to spoofing and MITM, repetition attacks, brute force vulnerabilities, denial of service (not decryption, but still a pain), leaking privacy information, etc. Some of the scarier ones include
20: negotiable key lengths (down to 1 byte!!!)
19: unknown strength of PRNGs.
8: key pairs may be static or otherwise weakly generated
Then you can go through section 4.4 and read a dictionary's worth of recommended practices and at that point, it's just not worth the headache anymore.
But just in a more general sense, Bluetooth is very complex and there are dozens of potential vectors. You have to trust that the handshake protocols are secure, the firmware is secure, the drivers are secure, and the vendors' implementations of all these protocols and specifications are secure. And anyone who knows anything about how the tech industry works knows that security is never anything more than an afterthought (or even worse, just straight out compromised in the name of ease of use). Just look at how many wireless routers, smartphones, and operating systems are vulnerable, and you also have to make sure that your devices are constantly kept up-to-date as well, and you need to just pray that there are no backdoors in there anyways. And just look how innocuous these attacks can be - stagefright, for example, just requires sending a text to a vulnerable device and you'll never know that you've already been pwned!
Simply put, there's just way too much that could go wrong, and I don't want to trust my servers' security on the hundreds of things that could go wrong. We already have tools like aircrack for wireless networks, so who knows what's available for cracking slightly more obscure protocols like Bluetooth on the darknet. Bearing in mind that all communication between the keyboard and the device is _outside_ of any client-server encryption and you should expect that everything this exposed in my personal opinion....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @09:48AM
Are you suggesting we can't write e-mails or administer servers from phones because we lost superfluous hardware buttons? I'm kinda lost for words.
(Score: 2) by rondon on Thursday September 10 2015, @02:34PM
I don't think superfluous means what you think it means, as the gp definitely considered them important to the function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @09:50PM
Superfluous definition, being more than is sufficient or required; excessive.
I think hardware keyboards on a phone are surplus to requirements when you can have a (larger) screen that can also display a keyboard when needed. Fair enough?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday September 10 2015, @05:54PM
Try to send command-line instructions using swype and autocorrect...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @09:40PM
I have. Touchscreens can actually make it easier to enter some special characters, but to be fair it may depend on the respective keyboards you're comparing.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday September 11 2015, @01:16PM
Prior to Steve Jobs fucking everything up, phones had physical keypads which made it possible to actually do things with them, like writing emails
It's possible to actually do those things with a software keyboard, too. There are pros and cons for both, and no need for such hyperbole.
Physical keyboards didn't die a death just because Steve Jobs ruled against them from his curvaceous white throne.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1) by kazzie on Thursday September 10 2015, @01:23PM
Is that faster than the curiously high bandwidth LMNOPRAM I've got installed?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday September 10 2015, @06:27PM
It's a Ram Of Unusual Size.