AppleInsider Staff
Donald Mustard, creative director for Epic Games subsidiary Chair Entertainment, recently let slip in an interview detailing Infinity Blade 2 that the iPhone 4S will sport 512 MB of RAM.
Given that a demo of Infinity Blade 2 was prepared for and unveiled as part of Apple's iPhone 4S keynote presentation last Tuesday, Mustard's comments are likely a result of first-hand knowledge of the iPhone 4S specifications, as Apple was reported to have provided select game developers with early versions of the iPhone 4S hardware for their development purposes.
Separately, a poster on a Chinese-language blog claims to have taken possession of the iPhone 4S, which he also says has 512MB of RAM. Both reports appear to confirm an AppleInsider article that first reported the information in early September.
With the move to Apple's A5 chip and dual-core graphics, the iPhone 4S's underpinnings now largely mirror that of the iPad 2, which also contains 512MB of RAM.
For the past two years, Apple has used the iPad to usher in a new mobile architecture before transferring those rights to a new iPhone. As such, iPad 3 stands to become the most likely iOS device to first receive an upgrade to 1GB of RAM when it hits the market early in the second quarter of 2012.
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
Christine McKee
Andrew O'Hara
95 Comments
I see no reason to assert that the iPad 3 will contain 1GB of RAM, nor sufficient reason to define 1GB of RAM as some kind of new 'threshold' for Apple's iOS products.
With the move to Apple's A5 chip and dual-core graphics, the iPhone 4S's underpinnings now largely mirror that of the iPad 2, which also contains 512MB of RAM.
Benchmarks seem to indicate that the iPhone 4S' A5 processor is likely clocked slower than the iPad 2's processor.
I see no reason to assert that the iPad 3 will contain 1GB of RAM, nor sufficient reason to define 1GB of RAM as some kind of new 'threshold' for Apple's iOS products.
Safari would benefit greatly from increased RAM to handle graphic intensive websites such as Memebase better. Or, multiple tabs.
Benchmarks seem to indicate that the iPhone 4S' A5 processor is likely clocked slower than the iPad 2's processor.
Makes sense. It's a smaller, more mobile device, and lacks the battery of the iPad 2.
I see no reason to assert that the iPad 3 will contain 1GB of RAM, nor sufficient reason to define 1GB of RAM as some kind of new 'threshold' for Apple's iOS products.
Moreover, it is likely that there is an iPhone 4S with 1GB of RAM sitting in a lab in Cupertino. The Powers That Be simply decided that the extra RAM really didn't provide a significant improvement of the user experience that is achieved with 512MB. I'm sure Apple's prototype testing protocol includes a wide variety of functions (web browsing, photography, videography, editing media, a selection of popular apps, Siri, etc.).
It's time to rethink the correlation between memory and performance. Looking at iPhone 4S' performance today, it's clear to me that I have more learning to do. I'm wondering if this is purely the result of software optimization. Whatever the case, the guys in Cupertino know something that many technologists do not.