Even before reading this article, we all know that a smartphone with 8GB RAM is definitely stronger than one with 6GB RAM or 4GB RAM. However, have you ever wondered how powerful it really is?
8GB RAM smartphone: how powerful is it?
Seeing more and more smartphones launched with 8GB RAM, doubled that of the current 4GB RAM flagships, many of us can’t stop but wonder that, do we really need that much RAM? What are the differences you can experience when using a smartphone with such a huge RAM capacity? In a previous article, we talked about how our smartphones function as well as explained the way they use up the RAM capacity. Now, we will go further into details so that you can really understand how powerful 8GB RAM smartphones can actually be.
We know that after each activity finishes, or after each app you close, your phone doesn’t stop the action immediately. Instead, the current process is kept inside the system (aka cache) and stay there. This help your phone to resume the process faster when you come back. Only until there is the need to free up memory to run another app does it finally kill off the cache. And in order to decide which process to keep and which to kill first, there is the LMK driver (Low Memory Killer). This driver, depending on each mobile, will evaluate and rank each process into a different level of importance.
Therefore, the main different between a 4GB RAM smartphone and a 6GB RAM smartphone, or a 6GB RAM smartphone and an 8GB RAM smartphone is that the bigger RAM is able to cache more processes in the background. These can stay for a longer time without having to activate the LMK to kill them off. The more and longer processes stay as cache, the better multi-tasking your smartphone will perform. However, this doesn’t depend only on the RAM but needs the contribution of other features too, especially the UI. That being said, the lightest UI gives the largest portion of free RAM on the device.
8GB RAM smartphone VS 4GB RAM smartphone
To make the long story short, 8GB RAM offer doubled the capacity for cache storage, compared to 4GB RAM smartphones. For the exact same model with no changing in terms of the UI, processor and CPU, we can say that the 8GB RAM variant can do twice as good multi tasking as its 4GB RAM counterpart.