That’s insane for so many reasons.
Reasons such as?
Phones don’t need 16 GB of RAM.
That’s why it is insane. It is a crazy huge amount of ram that is eaten up like crazy.
At least the OS seems to know that the additional memory is there. This means root apps or custom ROMs should be able to use all 16GB.
What about the regular 9?
They only have a few MB reserved for Google’s AI, most of the 12GB is free for all apps on other models.
It’s 3 gb
What is? The reserved RAM for Google Gemini on the Pixel 9 Pro XL? Yes, I know
On the Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel 9, we note just 0.26GB (275,336KiB) of locked RAM […], a very small amount most likely used for some background tasks in the OS. However, on the Pixel 9 Pro XL, this leaps to 2.91GB (3,051,936KiB) of Unevictable and Mlocked RAM. Subtract out the Unevictable RAM from the Pixel 9, and there’s an extra 2.64GB (2,776,603KiB) reserved on the Pro models.
Really interesting. I wonder what features the Pro XL has that the Pro version doesn’t to use over 10 times more RAM.
How did google manage to make a version of linux more bloated than windows? It’s almost impressive.
Tbf the high ram usage wouldnt be a problem if it cached processes in it and used it to save battery but its just pure bloat. I think phones should have a coprocessor that handles notifications like what smartwatches do and that basically free battery. But android is also bloated because apps take a very long time to launch because of the jvm and java (thats what i heard at least, idk if this is actually why its slow) so everything is just left active. Also i think android strayed too far from linux, its basically just a worse version with a mobile ui and the support of a country sized company.
AI bullshit.
And telemetry
For the same reason turning off a screen in Android works in less than a second and doesn’t drain your battery in half an hour while modern standby still barely works in Linux: optimisations.
Android is made to cache and freeze processes when switching apps. The more RAM you have, the more apps can have ready to go in an instant. When an app gets swapped out to storage, it’s very clearly noticeable, and many apps don’t bother to store state either. The Android approach to slick multitasking is to open as many applications as can fit in RAM, which is why apps launch faster than many Linux applications, even on much faster SSDs.
RAM really isn’t that expensive, and the power savings of rarely ever initialising applications is worth it.
while modern standby still barely works in Linux: optimisations.
Steam Deck likes to have a word
The Steam Deck does sleep very well, but as far as I know, it doesn’t do low-power background stuff while in sleep mode (Android does this for notifications, Windows will try to download updates, etc.).
I think the Deck uses classic S3 sleep rather than S0ix sleep.
16GB of RAM sounded too good to be true. Granted 13GB is nothing for sneeze at still. Hopefully, they can provide an option to toggle it off. Sounds wasteful for people who would use it once a while.
It does have 16GB of RAM, though, it just reserves 3GB of it for AI stuff. I don’t know what kind of AI stuff needs to be loaded in the background continuously, but running the same apps on other phones will also drain 3GB out of the embedded 16GB of RAM.
I can’t really think of a reason why someone would buy the most expensive “AI phone” and then never use AI. The other Pixel models don’t have this stuff, so people who won’t use AI should probably just get a cheaper phone.
Just getting the 3GB of RAM used is not the issue. There are apps which can use even more. The issue is its reserved meaning its not available to your other apps.
An option to remove the lock while still being able to utilize the RAM (should the need arise) and AI features should be provided for flexibility should one desire.
I bought it cause I wanted pink and I like larger phones smaller phones feel uncomfortable to hold I wish the AI stuff would get lost it’s all nonsense that does nothing to improve anything and only slows you down and is an excuse for more spyware
Only? I have just 8 GB RAM on My PC.
And Android device which I am using to comment this have just 2GB RAM.
Chrome casually using 8gbs with a few tabs open. Also windows 11. I got a school laptop and windows uses 5gb out of the box💀. Linux supremacy.
Firefox using way less than that for like 20 tabs…
Chrome using 8gbs ram is not necessarily a bad thing
Usually browsers use a lot because nothing else is using the ram. If you had a separate program running, the browser would stop using as much.
Shhh if you take away their illogical reasons to b**** about stupid things they’ll find more annoying things to b**** about. Just nod and say yeah buddy too bad about that ram somebody should do something about that, and back away slowly.
Your OS is not necessarily using those 8gb, it just reserved them, meaning other apps can still use it
No thats virtual ram that works differently. Virtual ram is usually much more than 8gb.
Only?
I assume 13GB shared with all active apps and not 13 per app.
I know how RAM works
Sure about that?
https://fedia.io/m/android@lemdro.id/t/1119259/Tested-Google-s-Pixel-9-Pro-models-only-have-13GB-RAM/comment/6949769#entry-comment-6949769
Yes. Lots of people here have much less than even 13GB physical ram. My Pixel 4a has 6GB. So reading a news about how apps have “only” access to 13GB sounds just weird when that’s more than twice the total ram you have available.
I agree about that but it’s stupid that you only have access to 13 of 16 GB.
If there’s no way to disable the LLM then yes, I agree.
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.
Seriously, what app is capable of saturating 13GB?
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.
Ooh I understand that it’s for AI, I just meant that more RAM would certainly help in this case.
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.
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What if we use graphene OS I would guess that RAM would not be longer use and you can use the full 16GB.
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I think it’s likely you would have access to all of it because the testing in the article clearly shows the kernel can see the memory. Thus, the graphene kernel should be able to use it.
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.
Me too, and I’ve never had an issue juggling those apps on my Pixel 6 with 8gb RAM.
At that point I go to my PC.
Ollama server running in termux
I think it’s more to do with app switching without having to reload or losing your state in minimized apps.
Barely enough for the OS and one app
My gaming PC has 9
Not a big deal.
Wait until you find out how much ram gets wasted in caching and algorithms designed to run faster on computers or improve productivity. Even things like indexing to speed up search or icon caching
It’s a mobile phone. 13gb is lots, and I’d be curious to see the extent that ai improves productivity.
The headline is designed explicitly to bait arguments
The problem is Android is fuckterrible at using RAM properly.
