I agree that the smartphones with less than 6GB physical ram can benifit from Virtual ram for some extend. But what the point of delivering this feature (its OK if we can turn it off. But it cannot be turned off as per current situation) to the phones that has 6GB, 8GB and even 12GB physical rams?
4GB of virtual RAM cant match even to the 2GB physical RAM because its comparatively very slow. And having a feature like this on phones with huge rams is OK if there is no drawbacks. RAMs always clears and reiterates data on it. And here is the catch. Most of the Samsung devices use UFS storage. This means everytime something written and deleted, the storage shrinks. (This is not drastic in common usage and easily ignorable because the main target of the main storage is to use it for apps and other user stuff.) But the RAM plus, it always writes, and then deletes it and writes and deletes again and so on. And its not what ROM suppose to do. This means it can make considerable impact on storages' longevity. Comment your thoughts.Constructive critisism is always welcome.
I don't think the ram+ is used like actual ram. If you are familiar with windows ,you know that it also does this by placing the pagefiles (which are the necessary data but does not need to be modified or transfered regularly) on a storage drive so you have a plenty of headroom when comes to storage. These days almost every pc have a non-volatile memory such as a SSD or nVMe,m.2 as the boot drive so it should affect too. But no one is concerning about that. Because a regular non-volatile memory will last more than 100 years as I remember and it will only reduce to about 30 years if you put the device at the most extreme conditions.
So... I guess the performance gain over such time is more worth than the lifespan... Even UFS is so fast... It still comes behind in compared to the actual ram. So this won't make a big difference. Specially if it's a flagship or have enough performance. But if this is a budget device... Things are yet to be considered.
I hope they'll give an option to disable it somehow but they must have tested it as much as they can before. So... I think it's a good addition even everyone gets the advantage from it or not.
First of all thank you for your comment. But I cant totally agree with that. Solid state devices are capable of giving full performance only for 10 years.(This not necessarily mean that after 10 years its not usable or something) After that the noticable degradation appears. And as the vendors mention, the way they use virtual ram is not as same as the way that windows manages it. What they gonna do is after filling up the physical ram, rather than putting the most unwanted app to sleep, considering that the extra ram as a ram and put it there for quick launching. In otger words, if you are not one who clears your recents or use only few apps that not take that much of ram, The Virutal ram is gonna do the same thing what physical RAM does. And I agree UFS is very fast. Specially after version 2.1. But the problem is still its bot even closer to the Physical RAMs' speed. And the worst thing is UFS is bot good for random read and writes, it reach its best obly in sequential reads and writes unlike the NVME.As I know the only vendor who use NVME for mobile devices is Apple and I am certain that they are not gonna implement virtual ram because actually IOS dont need that anyways.
Yeap... You are correct... In Linux the pagefiles are different and as Samsung says.. they are gonna use the ram+ if the device ram reaches the full capacity or smthing... So that is a drawback too because at that moment the extra slow ram is really not gonna help much...I would like to how they are gonna implement it on both flagship and mid range as well as in budget devices hence I am still at the budget level.
And yeah... In compared to ios, android never have been able to properly manage the memory and that's why it needs a huge amount of ram unlike ios.
At least it's an over the air update and I hope they will provide a bit more control over ram + in the future so we can see the actual differance with or without it.
And I agree that the typical usage gonna degrade the SSD. But thats not what I want to mean by it. We are degrading the storage continuosly doing unnecassery thing. For an example its like a Li-ion battery. We know that it degrades even when not used and gonna degrade faster with charging and discharging. But its OK because its necessary and its the expected use of it. But we should avoid charging it with incompatiable charger because that gonna degrade the vattery and its a wastage. Its something we can simply do without damaging the battery that much. Simply think, why do we need a LPDDR4 physical RAM, if its possible to archieve with using 8GB or so storage space on UFS 3.1. Its lot cheaper and You can double the ram for the fraction of the cost.
