Why is 8GB of storage not enough now? Mobile phone manufacturers act collectively, and Xiaomi reveals the truth.

Things don't seem to develop as we expected. Just when we all think that 8GB memory is "over-performance", mobile phone manufacturers are pursuing higher performance ceilings.

Since Huawei Mate 40 series introduced memory expansion technology into mobile phones for the first time and optimized 8GB to 10GB. Major mobile phone manufacturers have responded. With Xiaomi and Realme also joining the battle, memory expansion technology has become the standard of flagship mobile phones.

What makes people laugh is that the competition between manufacturers is really everywhere, and everyone wants to prove that they are better than others. Huawei only merged 2GB of memory at first, and then vivo was upgraded to 3GB. OPPO is even crazier, directly announcing that it supports the memory expansion of up to 7GB, and the running memory can even be piled up to19GB-this is an exaggeration, because most laptops only come standard with 16GB of memory this year.

Xiaomi's attitude towards new technology is relatively stable, and it only supports the expansion of 3GB of running memory. The collective action of mobile phone manufacturers makes people wonder: Why does it seem that 8GB of memory is not enough for the current flagship Android phone? At the press conference of Xiaomi MIX4, the MIUI team revealed the "truth".

When Xiaomi introduced the enhanced version of MIUI 12.5, he specifically mentioned that according to the data tested by Xiaomi Lab, a chat software has added about 80 new functions in the past two years, and the occupancy rate of background storage has increased by nearly 67.9%.

Someone once said: What many developers do is not an APP, but an "operating system". All the functions are crammed in, making the APP more and more bloated. In fact, the functions of many apps are highly coincident. If you don't believe me, you can try it now: turn on your mobile phone and you will find that there are no fewer than five apps with "car service".

This is not a case, but a common phenomenon. From a macro point of view, in 202 1 year, the average background memory of APP increased by 70% compared with two years ago. At this rate, by 2023, maybe 8GB mobile phones will really be eliminated.

The situation of mobile phone manufacturers is actually very embarrassing, and the Android ecosystem is open. In the absence of effective binding force, mobile phone manufacturers can't expect APP developers to be tied in front of interests, nor can they expect memory suppliers to sell at reduced prices, let alone expect users to understand the pressure of rising costs.

In this context, memory expansion technology can be said to have emerged. It can not only greatly alleviate the "memory anxiety" of consumers, but also make mobile phone manufacturers not have to work hard to control costs and prolong the service life of mobile phones.

The more important question is coming: how is the memory expansion technology realized? Does it really make sense to "generate" running memory out of thin air? Let's start with a conclusion: this is a very, very old technology, not a new selling point. It is essentially the same as the "virtual memory" of Windows and the "swap memory" of M 1 version of Mac.

The memory expansion technology adopted by Android phone manufacturers, the so-called "memory fusion technology", is simply the fusion of memory and flash memory. In the flash memory used to store data, a part is "cut off" as running memory, thus achieving the effect of increasing storage.

However, this method has a natural disadvantage. The reading and writing performance of flash memory is far inferior to that of running memory. If the speed of LPDDR5 can reach 44GB/s, the speed of flash memory will generally not exceed 2000MB/s, with a gap of more than 200 times.

In other words, the storage increased by memory fusion technology can never be compared with the real hardware upgrade. It is rational that Xiaomi only supports the expansion of 3GB of memory, because the biggest significance of this thing is to throw inactive background applications into virtual memory with low performance, reduce the occupation of real running memory, and ensure the smooth switching of foreground applications.

I believe you will understand when you see it here. This statement of "19GB" is a concept of stealing-theoretically, the virtual memory of Windows can be adjusted to twice the physical memory capacity, but can computer manufacturers say that 16GB memory is 48GB memory?

For domestic Android phones, the emergence of memory expansion technology does have certain significance. Because the push mechanism is not perfect, most Android apps will choose to leave some threads in the background to push messages at any time. Applications that reside in the background don't need much performance, but they occupy capacity and waste hardware resources.

From this point of view, "converged memory" reduces meaningless hardware waste and really prolongs the service life of mobile phones. All in all, 8GB of memory is not "insufficient", but domestic Android phone manufacturers have found a cheaper solution to the current situation that memory is abused by the APP background-how to kill the chicken? You're right.