How much RAM does the iPad have?

[spinnerlys]

Am I in crazy town? Someone wonders how much RAM is in an computing device on a web forum dedicated to the company that makes said devices and gets responses along the lines of, "YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB!" And yeah, I do get the who idea that it's not like you have a choice and the device either works well for you or it doesn't, but still. You're not allowed to ask questions about technical specifications of the iPad? Sheesh.

Of course someone is allowed to ask questions about technical specifications, and as you might have read, we couldn't answer on the amount of RAM, as only Apple and its affiliates know.
It then got into a discussion about the use and importance of RAM in a device like the iPad and if it would really make a difference if one knew.

For example: The iPad has 256MB RAM. What kind of information does that give you? Do you now know how well it will perform? Or do you think that 1GB would be better?
The iPad is a custom tailored design with custom tailored apps that don't need more than what they can get. So if 1GB of RAM is inside that frelling thing, then that will be enough for all the applications it will run.

 

[whizpup]

Certainly no more than 1GB... 512MB seems very possible given the device's limitations.
I had this discussion the other day as well. I complained that I wanted a full blown tablet rather than pared down and crippled scribble pad. My buddy argued that by keeping it very simple. light and laser focused on what it needs to do .. it can then perform fabulously well. Once the door opens for a zillion other possible functions the device becomes a muddy mess.
He actually swayed me to his view.

 

[vini-vidi-vici]

It doesn't matter.

The original question is pointless anyway. In any computer system there are many levels of memory on the chip, chipset, elsewhere on the board (what's traditionally called "RAM"), flash, hard disks, etc...

Without knowing the details of the processor's performance and architecture, it's impossible to derive any meaning from a such a number.

With an traditional desktop/laptop computer, we know quite a deal about the system architecture, and can make judgments on "how much RAM is enough" for a given purpose, but with the iPad, there is no such knowledge. The only answer that makes sense, is that it has "enough".

 

[agbot]

Of course someone is allowed to ask questions about technical specifications, and as you might have read, we couldn't answer on the amount of RAM, as only Apple and its affiliates know.
It then got into a discussion about the use and importance of RAM in a device like the iPad and if it would really make a difference if one knew.

For example: The iPad has 256MB RAM. What kind of information does that give you? Do you now know how well it will perform? Or do you think that 1GB would be better?
The iPad is a custom tailored design with custom tailored apps that don't need more than what they can get. So if 1GB of RAM is inside that frelling thing, then that will be enough for all the applications it will run.

I completely get that, and it makes sense Apple doesn't publish those numbers since it is kind of irrelevant to the platform - it's not like there are other companies making iPads you would compare it to. As an embedded-software-on-ARM-devices software engineer nerd myself, I'm certainly curious though. And even if the RAM happens to sound low when compared to whatever magic number I have in my head, if it still works well I'll still buy one.

As far as waiting for the teardown, I would half expect Apple to silkscreen their own logo and part number over everything just to be difficult. Bring on the acid etch!

And +1 for the Farscape reference. It's almost oldschool these days with all the "fraks" flying about.

 

[spinnerlys]

And +1 for the Farscape reference. It's almost oldschool these days with all the "fraks" flying about.

I also use frak or frack from time to time, but smeg is better in many ways.
Frell doesn't always work, it may be the sound or whatever, but sometimes it feels fubar.

Imagine what I have written being said with a high pitched helium voice though.

 

[MacAgent84]

I don't know why Apple would want to keep people in the dark on this particular tech spec. People will eventually find out anyway.

If the iPad only has as much RAM as the small iPhone 3GS, even with the 1GHz A4, those specs would not be impressive enough for me to buy the iPad.

If the iPad indeed does have double the RAM of the iPhone 3GS, 2x256 512MB, then that would be substantial enough of hardware for me to buy.

Wouldn't you want to know whether or not the iPad is substantially more capable than an iPhone 3GS in its hardware?

 

[spinnerlys]

I don't know why Apple would want to keep people in the dark on this particular tech spec. People will eventually find out anyway.

If the iPad only has as much RAM as the small iPhone 3GS, even with the 1GHz A4, those specs would not be impressive enough for me to buy the iPad.

If the iPad indeed does have double the RAM of the iPhone 3GS, 2x256 512MB, then that would be substantial enough of hardware for me to buy.

Wouldn't you want to know whether or not the iPad is substantially more capable than an iPhone 3GS in its hardware?

Yes, I and many others, but not everyone, would like to know, but what do you think RAM has to do with being more capable than the iPhone.

All in all the iPad is more capable due to the larger screen, bigger storage capacity, faster and more advanced CPU and other aspects.
The RAM plays an important role and sometimes is only used for tit/clit-measuring anyway. Or was it dick?

The average user does not even know what RAM is there for. They only "know", the more the better.

The iPhone does not even list its CPU speed, but many other smartphone vendors do.

1GHz in an iPad is different than 1GHz in an iMac.

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

I don't know why Apple would want to keep people in the dark on this particular tech spec. People will eventually find out anyway.

If the iPad only has as much RAM as the small iPhone 3GS, even with the 1GHz A4, those specs would not be impressive enough for me to buy the iPad.

If the iPad indeed does have double the RAM of the iPhone 3GS, 2x256 512MB, then that would be substantial enough of hardware for me to buy.

Wouldn't you want to know whether or not the iPad is substantially more capable than an iPhone 3GS in its hardware?

Yet you haven't given a single reason as to why you need that much RAM. Especially if the device runs smooth as is.

What exactly is your computer science background?

 

[vini-vidi-vici]

I don't know why Apple would want to keep people in the dark on this particular tech spec. People will eventually find out anyway.

If the iPad only has as much RAM as the small iPhone 3GS, even with the 1GHz A4, those specs would not be impressive enough for me to buy the iPad.

If the iPad indeed does have double the RAM of the iPhone 3GS, 2x256 512MB, then that would be substantial enough of hardware for me to buy.

Wouldn't you want to know whether or not the iPad is substantially more capable than an iPhone 3GS in its hardware?

This is ridiculous. If you're worried about performance, just go to an Apple store after it comes out and use one. If it's fast enough for you, great. If not, fine.. don't get it. You have absolutely no idea "how much RAM is enough" for the iPad... neither does anyone else.

 

[MacAgent84]

I don't understand why some of you insist that RAM is irrelevant and that it will not impact the performance of the iPad no matter what the size. Of course RAM impacts the performance of a computing device. It does not take a smart person to understand that.

RAM is particularly important for graphics/gaming and this spec will be indicative of the gaming capability of this device versus an iPhone 3GS. What is so hard to understand here?

The only way to know if the iPad is a larger glorified iPhone 3GS or iPod Touch is to know whether or not the internal hardware is better.

What is so hard to understand here?

 

[spinnerlys]

This is ridiculous. If you're worried about performance, just go to an Apple store after it comes out and use one. If it's fast enough for you, great. If not, fine.. don't get it. You have absolutely no idea "how much RAM is enough" for the iPad... neither does anyone else.

WE ALL KNOW, we just don't tell anyone anymore. Only the ones that know, that that iPad will be a failure.

Besides the sarcasm, vini-vidi-vici, may I know why you chose vini instead of veni?

 

[wyneken]

Just curious, what sort of work do people do with pages? Make flyers and type up reports about kangaroos? It seems like for anything relevant a more professional layout system should be used.

Have you used Pages? I'm a writer and teacher, and Pages is not my first-choice writing tool, but it's a quite powerful and nicely thought-out application. I do use it in a few situations (like personal letterhead and resumes) where I am especially fussy about the exact look of the finished product. It handles this kind of thing very well without a cluttered interface or a steep learning curve.

It also works fine as an ordinary word processor. In fact it feels a bit too feature-rich for somebody who just wants to crank out text, which is mostly what I do. But it's easy in Pages to create personalized templates for whatever kind of documents you create regularly -- the same is true for most serious word processing apps -- so once you've spent a little time setting it up for what you want to do, everything is pretty effortless afterward.

Nobody has seen yet how the forthcoming Pages app on the iPad compares to the full-blown iWork version, but I don't have any serious doubt that it will meet my personal needs ... as long as it can print.

 

[jeznav]

I have a hunch that its has the same amount of ram that is in the iPhone 3GS.

Most applications don't consume a lot of RAM as much on a mobile device than on the desktop. Graphically intensive games will likely utilize more RAM space. The increased size of iPad's resolution takes about 3mb = (1024x768*32bits)/8bit/1024kb of RAM for Frame Buffering. That is 5 times more than iPhone's Frame Buffer (600kb). 3MB is not much. Add in the highly compressed PVRTC textures, vertex data arrays, audio samples and they add up to about 100+ megs for a graphically intensive game. But developers can also stream data from the flash storage ram so the system's ram size is never an issue.

Just look at consoles like PS3 and 360. They have limited RAM and users don't complain about it.

RAM size is only becomes an issue when it comes to running multiple applications at once.

For example: The iPad has 256MB RAM. What kind of information does that give you? Do you now know how well it will perform? Or do you think that 1GB would be better?
The iPad is a custom tailored design with custom tailored apps that don't need more than what they can get. So if 1GB of RAM is inside that frelling thing, then that will be enough for all the applications it will run.

I don't know why Apple would want to keep people in the dark on this particular tech spec. People will eventually find out anyway.

If the iPad only has as much RAM as the small iPhone 3GS, even with the 1GHz A4, those specs would not be impressive enough for me to buy the iPad.

If the iPad indeed does have double the RAM of the iPhone 3GS, 2x256 512MB, then that would be substantial enough of hardware for me to buy.

Wouldn't you want to know whether or not the iPad is substantially more capable than an iPhone 3GS in its hardware?

Why? Did your iPhone run out of RAM for running background applications?

1GHz in an iPad is different than 1GHz in an iMac.

Exactly. 1 Billion cycles per second accounts for how the CPU executes instructions and how many can be executed per cycle. iMacs which uses x86 is based on CISC (Complex instruction set computer). To get a piece of data processed, it can take several cycles to accomplish a task. The iPad's CPU is based of ARM is a RISC (Reduced instruction set computer). In this case, it only takes a few cycles to get data processed and passed around. In laymans term, even if both are running a clock at the same speed, in one second on a RISC based CPU, it processed more data than a CISC based cpu. The PPC also is RISC based.

Performance should not be based on *hertz alone.

 

[MacAgent84]

I have a hunch that its has the same amount of ram that is in the iPhone 3GS.

Most applications don't consume a lot of RAM as much on a mobile device than on the desktop. Graphically intensive games will likely utilize more RAM space. The increased size of iPad's resolution takes about 3mb = (1024x768*32bits)/8bit/1024kb of RAM for Frame Buffering. That is 5 times more than iPhone's Frame Buffer (600kb). 3MB is not much. Add in the highly compressed PVRTC textures, vertex data arrays, audio samples and they add up to about 100+ megs for a graphically intensive game. But developers can also stream data from the flash storage ram so the system's ram size is never an issue.

Just look at consoles like PS3 and 360. They have limited RAM and users don't complain about it.

RAM size is only becomes an issue when it comes to running multiple applications at once.

Thank you for the intelligent response.

Understandably, I would like there to be more RAM in the iPad than the iPhone 3GS. As I think this would give developers more leverage for gaming power.

Of course, there are ways to offset a lack of RAM in a device, but I would like the hardware itself to be substantially better than what can already be found in an iPhone 3GS. If they are the same, I will just keep my iPhone 3GS and wait for the hardware specs to increase in the iPad. Maybe the second generation iPad, if the device is successful in the market.

 

[jeznav]

I don't understand why some of you insist that RAM is irrelevant and that it will not impact the performance of the iPad no matter what the size. Of course RAM impacts the performance of a computing device. It does not take a smart person to understand that.

RAM size is irrelevant when it comes to mobile devices and running single session based programs like iPhones, iPods, and gaming consoles.

Its only relevant (size) when you have to run multiple applications at once and running an extremely large documents like editing RAW photos in 32bit mode.

But I'd rather look at RAMs bandwidth/speed(throughput) over the size of ram when it comes to performance.

RAM is particularly important for graphics/gaming and this spec will be indicative of the gaming capability of this device versus an iPhone 3GS. What is so hard to understand here?

That is true. But lets look back particularly at gaming console's RAM:
PSone: System ram = 2MB
Most Graphically Intensive Game: Metal Gear Solid

Dreamcast: System ram = 16MB, Video ram = 4MB
Most Graphically Intensive Game: Shenmue

PS2: System ram = 32MB, VRAM = 4MB
Most Graphically Intensive Games: Metal Gear Solid 2 / God of War I and II

Xbox: System ram = 64MB VRAM = shared
Most Graphically Intensive Games: Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, Doom 3, Half Life 2

PS3: System ram = 256mb, VRAM = 256mb
Most Graphically Intensive Games: MGS4, Uncharted 2, Heavy Rain, God of War 3

Xbox 360: 512mb = Shared ram
Most Graphically Intensive Games: Bioshock 2, Fear Effect 2, Mass Effect 2, Gears of War 2

So if the iPad has 256MB of ram, imagine what kind of games would run on it.

 

[MikhailT]

Amount of RAM determines how much resources a single application can have at a time. Think about the difference between the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS when it comes to Safari's tab windows. Once the memory get low enough in 3G, Safari will not be able to retain the content of the tab, often refreshing the page when the person return to that tab. On 3GS, no refresh is required as long as there's enough memory available to it.

While we have no choice in changing the amount of RAM in iPad, we should know anyway to see what kind of resources will be available to the applications, not just games.

People seem to forget that iPad is much larger than iPhone in terms of displaying data to users, not just the resolution of games. Accessing data in memory will always be faster than accessing it from the storage device, thus developers would like to know how much they can use up per application.

It's also curious what type of flash memory Apple will be using in iPad, the difference in installing and opening applications between 3g and 3gs is largely due to the faster NANDs. So will Apple use the same NANDs or faster?

None of us here knows all the answers. iFixIt will have all the details for us once the iPad ships.

 

[MacAgent84]

"RAM size is irrelevant when it comes to mobile devices"

I'm sorry, but RAM size is not irrelevant to mobile devices. The iPhone 3GS doubled the RAM size, and this dramatically shortened loading times and reduced crashes which would occur when the device would run out of available RAM.

 

[MikhailT]

"RAM size is irrelevant when it comes to mobile devices"

I'm sorry, but RAM size is not irrelevant to mobile devices. The iPhone 3GS doubled the RAM size, and this dramatically shortened loading times and reduced crashes which would occur when the device would run out of available RAM.

Application's loading time was due to the faster NANDs, not RAM size.

 

[vini-vidi-vici]

WE ALL KNOW, we just don't tell anyone anymore. Only the ones that know, that that iPad will be a failure.

Besides the sarcasm, vini-vidi-vici, may I know why you chose vini instead of veni?

Ha - because I wasn't thinking when I created my login, and now I'm stuck with it. That always seems to be the case with these kinds of forums... I go through a half-dozen ideas, all taken - then am left with whatever pops into my head. I originally only wanted to post/comment on one thing, but now here I am... posting about esoteric specs that only a half-dozen people in the world care about.

Or, maybe I should just say my cat is named vini (which he is, actually), so I picked that.

Or, maybe because I liked the look of all those "i"s...

 

[jeznav]

Thank you for the intelligent response.

Understandably, I would like there to be more RAM in the iPad than the iPhone 3GS. As I think this would give developers more leverage for gaming power.

As a developer, RAM size was never an issue for me. It is the SPEED and BANDWIDTH that I am after. Now that I know its 1Ghz and CPU-GPU-RAM on the same chip running at the higher clock cycle, execution is way way faster.

I was a little disappointed when I found out it uses the exact same GPU that is on the iPhone 3GS. I was hoping for more than 4-8 shader pipelines.

Application's loading time was due to the faster NANDs, not RAM size.

Don't forget that this is System on a Chip we're talking about. The global speed of the chip affects everything else(buses, etc.) There was a speed bump from the old iPhone which was rated at 412mhz to 3GS 600mhz. This accounts for not just faster loading times but the rate of which the CPU access the RAM at 600mhz. NANDs are still slower than iPhone's eDRAM. But its possible for the entire application including resources to be stream loaded to the RAM for instantaneous access.

 

[MikhailT]

As a developer, RAM size was never an issue for me. It is the SPEED and BANDWIDTH that I am after. Now that I know its 1Ghz and CPU-GPU on the same chip running at the clock cycle, execution is way way faster.

I was a little disappointed when I found out it uses the exact same GPU that is on the iPhone 3GS. I was hoping for more than 8 shader pipelines.

Who said it was the same GPU? Last I remember, it was stated that iPad uses the same GPU "family" not same GPU. I could be wrong, can you post your source? Source

The GPU could easily be doubled in RAM/Clock Speed with smaller process size for all we know.

 

[spinnerlys]

Ha - because I wasn't thinking when I created my login, and now I'm stuck with it. That always seems to be the case with these kinds of forums... I go through a half-dozen ideas, all taken - then am left with whatever pops into my head. I originally only wanted to post/comment on one thing, but now here I am... posting about esoteric specs that only a half-dozen people in the world care about.

Or, maybe I should just say my cat is named vini (which he is, actually), so I picked that.

Or, maybe because I liked the look of all those "i"s...

Or you just like wine?


singular

vinum - nominative
vini - genitive
vino - dative
vinum - accusative
vinum - vocative
vino - ablative

plural

vina - nominative
vinorum - genitive
vinis - dative
vina - accusative
vina - vocative
vinis - ablative




Can someone decline RAM please?

 

[jeznav]

Sgx 535

Who said it was the same GPU? Last I remember, it was stated that iPad uses the same GPU "family" not same GPU. I could be wrong, can you post your source? Source

Source: See screenshot attachment
Source 2: Link

Its still using SGX 535 that iPhone 3GS uses. And I knew this before they posted it frontpage.

The GPU could easily be doubled in RAM/Clock Speed with smaller process size for all we know.

Hopefully they increase it from 200mhz. http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3579&p=3

 

[MikhailT]

Source: See screenshot attachment
Source 2: Link

Its still using SGX 535 that iPhone 3GS uses. And I knew this before they posted it frontpage.



Hopefully they increase it from 200mhz. http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3579&p=3

Well that sucks. I don't see anything about anything faster than 200mhz SGX 535 in my short google search. Those are reserved for SGXMP series and they scale linearly with clock speed and cores (up to 16).

Is it not possible for Apple to use same driver bundle for both SGX/SGXMP?

 

[jeznav]

Well that sucks. I don't see anything about anything faster than 200mhz SGX 535 in my short google search. Those are reserved for SGXMP series and they scale linearly with clock speed and cores (up to 16).

Is it not possible for Apple to use same driver bundle for both SGX/SGXMP?

I just did a file size comparison on the GPU drivers on 3.1.3 and 3.2 and the one for iPad is 40kb bigger.

Update: Its just a driver specific software update mostly bug fixes.