They have 16GB of RAM physically, 3GB is reserved for AI. So yeah, only 13GB is usable by regular apps, even if you don’t care about any of the AI stuff.
It’s not about a single app, it’s about multitasking without having to reload apps.
At various times I’ve juggled between 4 apps at once on my phone. Say something like Messaging, Firefox, maybe a lemmy app, and Bitwarden for logging into something.
What if we use graphene OS I would guess that RAM would not be longer use and you can use the full 16GB.
Adding to what others said it is beneficial to load an app from RAM.
- Loads faster for user convenience
- Lower power usage so you’ll have better battery life
- More RAM reduces disk writes for cache / temporary files / from cold started apps that could write to storage.
Yeah but… I have a Pixel 6 with 8gb RAM. I just checked the memory usage. Over the past day, average usage has been about 4gb. And the biggest user is Android itself at 1.8gb. The next biggest is Instagram at 285mb, and that’s with me scrolling videos when I’m bored.
Adding hardware just for the sake of it just means it’s costing people for features they almost certainly won’t use.
If this is enabled by default it’ll certainly be needed, especially in cases like multitasking.
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/08/adding-16-kb-page-size-to-android.html?m=1
When Android uses this larger page size, we observe an overall performance boost of 5-10% while using ~9% additional memory.
From the linked article. So I doubt that the larger page size is the (only) reason for 16G ram. AI is the more likely reason.
