tap tap tap points out something that perhaps should have been obvious from the start regarding the iPhone 3GS‘ 256MB of RAM — that doubling the memory, once the OS loads and programs start eating away at it, often leaves more than double the free space.
The older iPhone models have been often considered underpowered when it comes to RAM, so even though the RAM amount is technically doubled, in actual use, you’ll often be working with 4x to 10x the amount of free RAM. And that’s one major aspect that’s contributing to the overall speedier feel of the 3GS.
As we saw in our video iPhone 3GS vs. iPhone 3G app launch smackdown, this translates directly into keeping Mobile Safari pages loaded, for example, when you exit out, load a large app, and then come back.
Two iPhones, 6 apps. We know the iPhone 3G S is supposed to be “on average” 2x faster than the iPhone 3G, but stats are stats and what we’re interested in is real-world usage. A few seconds here, a dozen or more there, and all of a sudden they add up to minutes.
In this video we launch apps on each iPhone 3.0 device at the same time, but imagine if every time the iPhone 3G S finished first, we immediately launched the next app. We wouldn’t make you sit through that much iPhone 3G lag, but that makes the point.
Also, we put a few webpages into Safari, then launched a heavy app, waited for it to load, then exited and went back to Safari to see how many would still be in memory.
Let’s just say, double the RAM makes more than double the difference…
Although unannounced, the iPhone 3GS uses (again) a Samsung SoC but this time instead of the ARM11 + MBX-Lite combo it’s got a Cortex A8 and PowerVR SGX; just like the [Palm] Pre.
So add that to the fast PowerVR SGX graphics core, and — to quote Steve Jobs — it’s a screamer!
Update: Apple Insider has a great run down of the technology inside the chipsets.
Apple is perhaps the most gluttonous consumer of flash RAM chips on the planet, what with most iPod’s flash memory based and still selling in the multiple tens of millions and — oh yeah — the iPhone and iPod touch. 14 million iPhone 3Gs were sold last year alone and this year? According to Apple Insider, they’s waddled the chair up and parked it right at the buffet:
The iPhone maker has bought out Samsung’s entire available supply, putting the world’s largest producer of flash memory on allocation until April 2009, according to the report. Samsung makes just over 40% of the world’s NAND Flash RAM.
There was no indication, however, whether or not Apple has switched to the double-capacity chips they’ll need to take the iPhone to 32GB. Due to the communications radios, previous iPhones have only 1 RAM slot as opposed the 2 in the iPod touch.
