Samsung’s 12Gb LPDDR4 Ram Chips Will Give Your Next Flagship Smartphone 6GB of RAM

As smartphones equipped with 3 and 4GB of RAM begin to litter the market, developers need to figure out ways to take advantage of them. The same could be said for phones that have 8 CPU cores - we keep packing more and more horsepower into these mobile devices but largely fail to take advantage of it. Given the general use of such devices, I suppose that's not too much of a surprise.

That reality doesn't matter to Samsung, though, as it's keen on keeping the train moving and always availing us more than what we need on the mobile front. In this particular case, that comes by way of brand-new 20nm 12Gb memory chips, ultimately making it possible for vendors to pack in a staggering 6GB of memory.

While I struggle to figure out how someone could take advantage of so much RAM outside of a desktop scenario, the benefits of this RAM will trickle down into phone models that use 3GB of the stuff - Samsung notes that this new LPDDR4 is 30% faster than the previous generation, and at 4266Mbps, it's twice as fast as typical DDR4 for desktops and servers. More than the fact that we will be able to see 6GB phones, that performance boost is great to see.

I mentioned "desktop scenarios" a moment ago, and it feels to me like that's where 4GB+ is going to be taken advantage of right now, although the market for those who want to use Android as a desktop OS is incredibly small. However, as our mobile devices continue to become ever-faster, it does seem likely that increased memory could be taken advantage of in video conversion apps, or even image manipulation. Still, 6GB in a mere phone is quite a feat, and it appears that such achievements are not going to end anytime soon.