Phones want 6 GB so they're making 1.5 GB chips. Apparently 4x 1.5 GB is cheaper than 3x 2 GB, probably because of yield. I imagine it complicates the address decode slightly but that's it.
This reminds me of triple-core processors that were "inconceivable" right until they shipped.
The PS3 had a PowerPC main core cpu and a 8 core cell chip. Of the 8 SPU cores, only 6 were available to developers as one was reserved for OS functions and the other, ironically enough, was held back for yield purposes.
Why? Why not 8? Whatever, I doubt I've ever seen a phone with more than 2 GB RAM. I wish my phone was as powerful as my PC (which is very old, has 4 GB RAM and can't handle more because of the chipset limitations) so I could just attach peripherals I want, boot a desktop Linux (directly or in a VM) and use it instead of the PC.
So they can sell you 8 next year. And 10-12 the year after that. And 16 after that. And so on and so forth...
> I doubt I've ever seen a phone with more than 2 GB RAM.
- The first phone with more than 2GB of RAM was the Samsung Note 3 back in 2013 - with 3GB.
- Almost every "flagship" phone since 2015/16 has had 4GB of RAM or more. So if you've seen people using phones on the street, subway, office, etc in the last 3 years, you've seen phones with more than 2GB of RAM.
> I wish my phone was as powerful as my PC...so I could just attach peripherals I want, boot a desktop Linux (directly or in a VM) and use it instead of the PC.
That would be awesome and is my ideal view of the mobile computing future.
> - The first phone with more than 2GB of RAM was the Samsung Note 3 back in 2013 - with 3GB.
Samsung Note 3 is exactly the model of my phone. I've always believed it has just 2 GiBs. Let me check...
Yes. free -g in Termux says 2. However...
... free -m says 2834 which means ~2.77 GiB. Well, this indeed is "more than 2GB of RAM" but not much and what a weird number...
> That would be awesome and is my ideal view of the mobile computing future.
Seems like it's the past already. There were numerous attempts (successful in a way or another) years ago and despite the fact smartphones become more and more powerful and add more RAM this approach still doesn't show signs of becoming popular and the most hyped projects get either discontinued or stagnant.
Samsung Dex[0] is still an active project and recently announced a beta version.
It will only work with newer Samsung devices though, which excludes my Galaxy S4 and of course all phones by other manufacturers.
While 12 is not a power of two, it is the sum of two powers of two (4 and 8).
A number of workstations that I have designed has used 2 sticks of 4GB RAM, and 2 sticks of 2GB RAM. This has saved money at little to no cost to performance.
"For non-binary memory densities, only a half of the row address space is valid. When the MSB address bit is HIGH, then the MSB-1 address bit must be LOW."
They basically cut off the upper 1/4 of the address decoder.
Also, and speaking as a jaded developer, it’s strategically a bad idea to give your team a 2x bump in available memory especially if it’s maxing out the memory on your servers. If that’s 16GB per slot then 12GB DRAM sticks let you slowly increase memory a bit longer.
Once you hit the ceiling a whole bunch of disciplines have to change overnight. Better to give them a 25-50% bump and start the story about horizontal scalability before you’re entirely out of other options.
Realistically that extra 25% is already taken up by the OS, GUI and other resources (AV, IDE, Electron apps, etc). You're already at a disadvantage to most server platforms.
I've been running 16-32GB for a very long time now. Servers can go into the multiple TB ranges.
