Start placing your bets now. This will be the thing that makes people upgrade.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
[Merged] iPad RAM / multi-tasking thoughts / etc
- Thread starter alldat
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Start placing your bets now. This will be the thing that makes people upgrade.
Electronic Arts developers don't code the sims 3 with 128MB in mind. it's pretty annoying to play the sims 3 on the original iPhone or iPhone 3G. it's running nice in 3GS though.
next year... just like iphone 3G with 128MB and iPhone 3GS with 256MB.
Big resources like graphics can and should be paged out when they aren't being displayed.
Typical background tasks like playing music, downloading a file, or processing sensor inputs wouldn't be substantially different on an iPad versus a smartphone. If Apple makes a multitasking API, it will probably involve forcing developers to create a separate daemon-style process that has no UI itself, and can therefore be as lightweight as possible.
But if you're hoping for the kind of multitasking that involves displaying more than one app at the same time, yeah, you're probably going to be disappointed.
Typical background tasks like playing music, downloading a file, or processing sensor inputs wouldn't be substantially different on an iPad versus a smartphone. If Apple makes a multitasking API, it will probably involve forcing developers to create a separate daemon-style process that has no UI itself, and can therefore be as lightweight as possible.
But if you're hoping for the kind of multitasking that involves displaying more than one app at the same time, yeah, you're probably going to be disappointed.
The iPad has 256 MB of RAM, and the CPU is 2x as fast as the iPhone 3GS'
For those of you that care, I can confirm that, at least according to BSD, the iPad has 256 MB of RAM.
If anyone wants to verify this, here's the objective-c function to try this with the iPhone SDK:
I'm a bit surprised that this amount is so small, but so far at least, it doesn't seem to affect performance much (the iPad is still very fast). This is the same amount as the third gen iPod touch and the iPhone 3GS. Maybe we'll see more of an impact if and when there's official iPad multitasking.
Synthetic Benchmarks:
Also, using a benchmark I wrote called Gauge Mathematical Tool, the iPad scores 380 points or so, compared to a score of 190 on my iPhone 3GS. It should be about twice as fast for apps that are intensive for the CPU.
Meanwhile, it takes about 4 seconds to find 50,000 digits of Pi on my iPad and 8.24 on my iPod touch 3G. This also shows a 2x speed improvement.
This makes sense, I think, as the iPad's A4 CPU frequency is almost twice as high as that of the iPod touch 3G or iPhone 3GS, and likely also benefits from tweaks to the architecture.
You can read more about how Gauge Mathematical Tool works internally at my website, thomashuntington.com, but it's a pretty good general use benchmark that is CPU, RAM, and Graphics intensive, available for all iPhone OS Devices in the App Store here.
Thomas Huntington
iPhone and iPad Developer
For those of you that care, I can confirm that, at least according to BSD, the iPad has 256 MB of RAM.
If anyone wants to verify this, here's the objective-c function to try this with the iPhone SDK:
Code:
//Returns bytes of RAM
int getRamSize()
{
int count ;
size_t size=sizeof(count) ;
if (sysctlbyname("hw.memsize",&count,&size,NULL,0)) return 1;
return count;
}I'm a bit surprised that this amount is so small, but so far at least, it doesn't seem to affect performance much (the iPad is still very fast). This is the same amount as the third gen iPod touch and the iPhone 3GS. Maybe we'll see more of an impact if and when there's official iPad multitasking.
Synthetic Benchmarks:
Also, using a benchmark I wrote called Gauge Mathematical Tool, the iPad scores 380 points or so, compared to a score of 190 on my iPhone 3GS. It should be about twice as fast for apps that are intensive for the CPU.
Meanwhile, it takes about 4 seconds to find 50,000 digits of Pi on my iPad and 8.24 on my iPod touch 3G. This also shows a 2x speed improvement.
This makes sense, I think, as the iPad's A4 CPU frequency is almost twice as high as that of the iPod touch 3G or iPhone 3GS, and likely also benefits from tweaks to the architecture.
You can read more about how Gauge Mathematical Tool works internally at my website, thomashuntington.com, but it's a pretty good general use benchmark that is CPU, RAM, and Graphics intensive, available for all iPhone OS Devices in the App Store here.
Thomas Huntington
iPhone and iPad Developer
Attachments
That seems like a woefully small amount of RAM unless it is allowed to use some of the storage as virtual memory.
iFixit has revealed that the iPad has 512MB of RAM, so there seems to be a bit of confusion in this regard, since many people report 256MB according to PadInfo results.
That makes more sense. I was a bit surprised at first to see 256 MB listed. I guess there's something fishy between the BSD frameworks and the actual hardware.
That could be, but I would tend to think that it's not. I'm pretty sure that the Video hardware (PowerVR SGX, most likely) in the A4 system-on-a-chip has its own dedicated memory.
The PowerVR SGX 540 shares its memory, which is in the same package.
Strangely when you X-ray the CPU there is 512MB RAM in the package. http://ifixit.com
Are you sure?!
Mulitasking works fine on my 2nd gen iPod Touch... works great actually! Mind you, it's JB with Backgrounder/ProSwitcher and it works as it should.
I have a feeling iPhone OS 4 will have some surprises
I imagine iPhone OS uses significantly less memory than the OS's of today -- and I imagine the iPhone apps aren't the memory-hogs that most common software is today.
Back when there were severe RAM and HD restrictions, developers had to get creative to make sure their software could run on as many computers as possible. Now, in the era of limitless RAM and storage space, bloatware once again reigns supreme.
If multi-tasking is implemented, devs will once again have to write good code to make sure their programs can play nice with others.