How much ram does the iPhone have?

[SPCartmanLand]

Also wondering what processor/speed its using

[geordisjd]

Also wondering what processor/speed its using

iPhone is powered by 620MHz ARM CPU, and has 128 Megs of memory.

[Cartmanland]

whats all this 512mb ram ive been seeing? false?

[geordisjd]

whats all this 512mb ram ive been seeing? false?

that's what I've been told (http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/07/13/iphone-os-x-architecture-the-mach-kernel-and-ram/), but Apple has always been mum about it.

[ColsTiger]

It's never been specifically stated, but some people much smarter than me have said it was 128MB of RAM of which 11MB was dedicated for graphics.

Check out the link:

Craig reckons that the actual memory bank size of the iPhone is 128MB of RAM and that 11MB of that total is most likely provided for integrated graphics. (http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/08/22/speculating-on-the-iphone-memory-footprint-and-cpu-speed)

[psylichon]

Regardless of the actual number, it's really amazing what it does with so little if you think about it.

[kdarling]

Note that the CPU is run at ~300 MHz in order to save battery.

Edit: Woof. Never post while typing on an iPod Touch at midnight. The correct speed is a little over 400Mhz.

[IphoneTony]

whatever the number is.. just think how small it is and how much it does.. Size does not matter ;)

[kdarling]

Yes it's amazing what fits in a pocket these days. And I'm sure that my kids will see astonishing stuff in the future.

Many of us used 1mhz or slower computers with tiny amounts of memory. And they ran very nice games and other apps. So today's devices should seem fast. :-)

[acosmichippo]

yeah, it's amazing the progress when you reverse-engineer alien technology.

[Lincoln]

It is amazing what it can do with so little. I've had Installer refreshing sources, music playing, iSolitare running, and be browsing Safari without any slowing down or heating up.

- John

[fury]

I wish we could run the CPU at full clock while plugged in.

As a matter of fact, why isn't there more power management configuration on the iPhone like there is on notebooks and such? Things like dimming the screen while on battery, slowing the CPU down, auto sleep...and when you plug in, staying at full brightness, full CPU speed, and staying awake...

It's running at 412MHz, btw, not 600some

[kdarling]

As a matter of fact, why isn't there more power management configuration on the iPhone like there is on notebooks and such? ...

Wonder how much Apple would allow something like that? Or like this:

I have a third party speed manager on an WM phone. It normally runs at 500MHZ, but drops down much lower for certain low-need states, and overclocks to over 700MHz for certain apps.

[Indy]

It is amazing what it can do with so little. I've had Installer refreshing sources, music playing, iSolitare running, and be browsing Safari without any slowing down or heating up.

- John

That's truly amazing! I would really enjoy just browsing and listening to my tunes.:wink: So if it will do those 2 things flawlessly I'm good!

[fourtheye28]

I thought flash drives don't need volatile memory because there is no lag time? Maybe I'm wrong and flash has memory dedicated to dump but...

[acosmichippo]

well, flash memory is different than RAM. While flash is definitely much faster than a standard magnetic disk, it is still not quite as fast as RAM.

also, flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles, so maybe using RAM somehow diminishes these.

[fourtheye28]

Somehow the lengthy post from my iPhone got deleted...Go figure. I was saying that I know computers (used to build them years ago) and a HDD needs RAM to do its instant work. There are a few MS lag time (11,15,18 etc) and RAM is there to expedite the process.. Ok so far so good. Flash is instant therefore requiring no lag time and no ram. So hear that people! I DON'T THINK THE IPHONE HAS ANY RAM. A Cache? Yes absolutely. There are memory hungry components in the iPhone. How big? 18 megs? 128 megs? Who knows.

[kdarling]

Of course the iPhone has RAM, otherwise its CPU couldn't run any programs.

It cannot run code from the Flash memory. It's a special hi-density Flash designed only for storage... it's not random access and it's fairly slow at retrieval and can only be written to in 256K blocks.

Whenever you run a program, it's loaded from Flash into the ~128MB RAM, and executed from there.

This is a reason why Apple decided that only one third party program will be allowed to run at a time... they're totally avoiding dealing with the usual problem of memory competition.

[phsycology]

I really don't care lol, it does a lot, and it fits in my pocket, so I'm good :)