Xiaomi Mi 5 spotted on GFXbench, 3GB RAM, 64GB ROM in tow

Hey if the guy loves his gaming so much, go buy an xbox or pswhatever.

Its a phome first, remember that. You domt buy a honda sedan to go to war. You buy a tank.

My two cents.

You really want desktop-grade power in your mobile phone? I’m just happy with my basic UMI even in 2016 ….lol.

😀

The problem is that by now you don’t have to be heavy multitasker to be bottlenecked by 3GB of Ram.

Since the release of Lollipop, even minimal use gets you to the 3GB mark and then memory management takes charge of things. When memory management starts routinely closing old apps you *know* you’re RAM bottlenecked and virtually all devices currently are.

IMO 4GB should be the minimum for a flagship, 6GB the optimum (for 2016 at least)…

Hey if the guy loves his gaming so much, go buy an xbox or pswhatever.

Its a phome first, remember that. You domt buy a honda sedan to go to war. You buy a tank.

My two cents.

You really want desktop-grade power in your mobile phone? I’m just happy with my basic UMI even in 2016 ….lol.

😀

It’s not “Desktop grade”, btw. Desktops (Windows Desktop I presume) are not comparable to phones. Phones are using linux kernel so they *need* much more ram for its normal operations and speed.

Desktops have a “pagefile”, so actually need less for simple use. It’s ridiculous that phones should have less RAM than a low end laptop, especially flagships like MI5 …

Like I said they need it whether they know it or not. It’s right there “virtually all devices currently are RAM bottlenecked”.

Which means that all flagships go slower than they could, all because they don’t have enough ram even for every day functions (ram management starts killing stuff relatively early on).

Of course “need” is a relative term. But if you buy a flagship you need the best of the best, 3GB is subpar at this point. It’s what 2GB was in KitKat era and 1GB was in Ice-Cream Sandwich era, *just enough*, certainly not flagship material.

I’m still laughing at it.

You probably don’t know of ram/disk caching. BTW I precisely talk about simple use (in Windows computers).

It’s funny BTW, since I’m probably one of the few in here to use Linux professionally. Most of you are Windows users so you don’t know what I’m talking about…

More trolling, oh this thread gets perfect all of the sudden. No comments that betray knowledge or understanding, just blind name calling…

I sent your assumptions that I use windows directly to > /dev/null.

You are comparing apples with pears when you bring Linux, Windows and Android on the same table.

These are my recommendations for his next Smartphone:

32GB RAM

Trideca-core (30 cores) SoC @ 4.0GHz in 0.5nm process tech (or better still, a Server grade multi-core CPU)

64TB ROM

5.5″ Display with 20K resolution

GPU with 16GB VRAM for pixel crunching on the 20K display

With that spec, even the Linux kernel will have to think twice before gulping the RAM.

He thinks he is the only Linux user in this community. Most of us here use both Linux, Mac OS X and Windows for different tasks. Talking all geeky even when he doesnt understand a lot of the technicalities involved in the resulting speed of devices.

I’m only comparing their ram management, clearly in fact. In androids and most distros they are clearly alike, in Windows it is not.

Since you’ve used Linux extensively you should know how much better use of available Ram can happen under a linux machine than under a windows machine.

The argument that “windows machines don’t need that much ram, therefore android phones shouldn’t”, sounds realistic but actually isn’t at all…

BTW I own two surface pros. I’ve install RemixOS (android distro) to both and after 2 hours of use the 8gb model was by FAR the fastest experience despite both using the same hardware in everything else (same SSD, both core i5).

Truth is that Android is always benefitted from more ram, Windows only sometimes (only if you are using specific software that makes use of it). Most people don’t know that, I have to inform them. Trolling don’t help (just run the experiment I wrote about -above-, just see for yourself how absolutely important ram is).

None is arguing about the importance of RAM.

Android and Linux (Unix) have a different memory management (even if they share the same kernel)

On Linux (and Windows too) when you run out of memory the kernel can either kill the process or dump it to the swap space (pagefile on windows).

On android instead of the whole image to the persistent space, it only writes a “screenshot” of the important data like GPS coordinates or last URL.

Swapping on android is different, but it shares the same concept with Unix which is to use as much RAM as possible (because emmc and SD card are too damn slow).

Now, Michael had also lifted another issue, which is swapping out to background.

You can’t run every processes on foreground, battery won’t last more than a bunch of minutes.

When a process is not used then android swaps it out to background freeing memory for the new application that requests it, only at the end it kills the process.

Now the question:

What scenario were you referring while saying that android needs 6-8gb of Ram?

I can’t picture 2-3 apps running on foreground simultaneously that all need 2GB of RAM each.

The bottleneck of phones is battery first, and then maybe persistent storage, defo not RAM

Learn basic math before pretending to be an expert on operating systems.

Apples with Pears (a set of 2 elements) doesn’t have a 1:1 mapping to a set comprising Linux, Windows and Android, which happens to be a set of 3 elements.

So much for your piping to dev null, tables with fruits atop and authoritative expertise on operating systems’ concepts.

Iphones runs smoothly with 1GB … Just saying

Grow up, and try to be objectively argumentative, which is always welcome. This poor gibberish will embarrass you years from now.

Fair explanation, but you do realize that you’re arguing with a crowd (two members in particular), who are:

1. Clandestine MediaTek Fanboys

2. Dislike QualComm but will deny it, claiming to be neutral

3. Feel that only value phone seekers are GizChina’s readership

4. That everyone is broke (or overspending)

5. That anyone who doesn’t share their opinions is wrong

6. That anyone who expects exotic devices is ridiculous

7. That such discussions should not be a part of GizChina

8. That we all should be striving to buy crappy, underpowered, middle-tier MediaTek based phones sold as flagships.

The point is moot Stef.

You realize everything you just said was complete BS. I can speak for Max because I know his recent phone history and if he was a “Mediatek fanboy” it would be pretty pecuiliar that he owned the following phones:

Xiaomi Mi4 – SD801

OP1 (wifes phones) – SD801

Redmi Note 3 Pro – SD650

Most of us here aren’t fanboys of Qualcomm or Mediatek, we can appreciate that both have had good and bad chips. You on the other hand are clearly a Qualcomm fanboy it shows in everyone of your comments including the one above.

I have never seen this side of you! You are owning people today, usually your the docile swan of this group and I am the angry bear who fights with everyone.

I know that caching prevent consume and while reading and writing from persistent uses more power.

I was still referring to swap to background.

I’m assuming you’re referring to me.

(You did the other day too but then took it back).

Reading your comment I can easily tell that’s you the one who can’t handle other’s people different opinions.

I’m not mocking anyone, I’m not using foul language, I’m not arguing over personal things, I’m debating over something in which I have a different opinion, I can also agree with people (I actually did with Stef already) or upvote them.

I had last year flagship phones (MI4 and OPO) both Qualcomm, and I’ve just got the Note3 PRO (Qualcomm) only because I needed a phone today and not in a month, but it doesn’t mean I won’t get the MI5 (whomever knows me know that I’ll buy it).

So that list that you made is just ridiculous because facts don’t support your opinion.

But I respect your opinion about me, clearly wrong, but i still respect it.

Nah, I’m debating over something, mostly over that “need”

I don’t agree that android needs more RAM, it might hypothetically benefit of it, but not need for sure

Lol

Are we still talking of RAM on phones are we? Can you reproduce your experiments on android phones?

Storing a whole app in RAM is far from being efficient (no mocking, simply my opinion)

Now imagine a offline GPS app with 1.7GB of maps of the whole USA going on RAM so when you can feel the speed when you open it.

Truth is that if I go from NYC to Secaucus I only need about 50MB of map’s files and there’s no need to occupy the RAM with the maps of Los Angeles.

Agree with you with importance of RAM and the more you give it to android the more it uses, but I disagree when you say that there’s “need” of more RAM (4-6 or even 8GB).

On android the unused RAM is a wasted RAM

BTW, before the Meizu MX5 you had a MI4, Nubia Z7… All Mediatek phones right?

You Elephone and me Doogee (Rosalia is actually my wife)

The point of my experiment was to see whether there can truly be unused ram in android and depending of the kind of use this is impossible (at least in phones). I gave my Mi4 to the wife who makes very basic use. I’ve installed a very basic AOSP ROM since she doesn’t care about the camera performance and even with her most basic use, texting mostly, 2.3GB were still occupied at the end of the day. I’m looking to do the same experiment when Google would release a 4GB phone, I’m sure android would find a way to use all of it.

The reason that I’m referring to the 6-8gb limit was because it was there that I indeed hit a wall. After a day of use my Remixed surface pro had almost 2GB or ram free. That’s the first time that I see Android not using all available ram (as available I call the total ram sans the amount reserved from android through the oom values). So it’s not out of a hat, it’s a real hard number that I found out of experimentation, granted I did not make a hard use, other people’s limit would be even further than that.

Certainly 3GB is not enough though if my wife can top it (and probably 4 isn’t either)…

2,3GB at the end of the day means that she can’t top it.

Because in that count you have to put also the unnecessary old data that android still kept in there because it didn’t even get close to the limit to start cleaning up some space to give it to a newer task.

Once you get to 3GB then Android is smart enough to erase the old unused data to free up room for the new process.

To make an analogy:

When I start to collect too much junk I think it’s time to get rid of it, you might find the solution on buying another shed.

Different opinion I guess.

In one of your previous comments you said that MIUI is heavy on RAM.

MIUI behaviour follows the Android philosophy, the more data you store on RAM the faster and more efficient will me.

People don’t realize that MIUI has a security center (antivirus), a cloud service with backup running at startup and many other services that AOSP doesn’t have, but they see this discrepancy of RAM as an issue.

There is a difference between “WANTS” and “NEEDS” man. Keep your objective arguments. I am more a realistic person and go with what I find to be realistic and not wish to have aliens from Jupiter prepare and serve my dinner when I know that’s UTTERLY UNREALIZABLE.

You are here whining about 4GB RAM and stuff, when the mighty iPhone is still using a 2GB RAM and no one is complaining about that.

Yep, I know your next line of “OBJECTIVE ARGUMENT”… iOS and Android are completely different OS with different kernel.

I find it completely STUPID that you, in your mighty geekiness does not understand that keeping so many apps in memory affects the overall performance of the device and also drains more power from the limited one being supplied by the battery. You also dont realize that some apps are CPU hogs and will continue to throttle your CPU even when you think you have minimized them into the background.

Dude, learn to quit (I MEANT QUIT AND NOT MINIMIZE) apps you absolutely dont have any use of at the moment. You cant tell me you will leave a game running in the background for the next 24hrs just because you dont have the time to play it now. And do you think you are the biggest gamer here in GizChina? A lot of us do same too, but dont go about ranting about it.

We all know that you have your millions of $$ stacked somewhere to purchase your 32GB RAM smartphone. But NO ONE wanna hear about it.

Sorry for getting into your conversation but the figure you use is clearly pulled out of a hat. *Test* your beliefs, you’re often wrong.

BTW I’m willing to to bet all your phones are around the OOM limit of open apps at the end of the day…

@disqus_0lJZ8Bi7SK:disqus

First, I clarified the other day it was a major typo. I mentioned it, twice, so not sure why you took this on you.

Second, the two people I mentioned earlier comprise an aged senior and his seemingly impoverished friend with extremely poor grammar, writing, humor and opinions.

You were not a target of that list, although at this point I’m pretty sure you won’t believe this and I’m afraid I can’t convince you. Still, you’re not on my radar at any point, if this helps any, so don’t be too bothered or offended or even concerned with that list.

I am guessing I am one of those two people, if I am the “aging senior” that is just hilarious, because I am younger than MaxPower. But as posted below here is my phone history of recent:

Meizu MX5 – MTK X10

Xiaomi Mi4 – SD801

Nubia Z7 – SD801

Gionee E7 – SD800

iOcean X8 – MTK 6592? (can’t remember which chip exactly it was)

Xiaomi Mi3 – SD800

Nexus 4 – SD S4 Pro

Blu Life Play – MT6582

For being a MTK fanboy, I sure have owned a lot of Qualcomm devices. The only SoC fanboy here is you.

1.5 out of 3GB…

This is hilarious!

It’s called a fragmentation & it’s tied to memory allocator. Up to 4.4 malloc whose used & it worked fine. From 5.0 new memory allocator is used that theoretically have better performance, smaller fragmentation & group (that can be shared) sessions. In practice it still doesn’t work well & have lost of memory leaks (thanks to other software), as much per app group sessions can help to get fragmentation down they will also consume more ram. That much about real practice.

You get apps crashes not because data is corrupted but because memory allocator is over runned & can’t make a ram reclaim on time (or simply saying bad memory management) so system kills request because if it continues to run & get stuck it will trigger kernel panic (defense mechanism that triggers restart to avoid system freeze). A good memory management will leave enough of ram free for new requests to get loaded directly & avoid reclaims (that cost a lot of time) naturally this is not manageable always. When it gets to data integrity new generations of non violate storage / RAM will help when they finally emerge (like for instance 3D x point). Forget about ECC on small consumer SoC-s it will never happen. Curent RAM uses in SoC-s (DPL DDR3, DDR4) actually consumes a lot of energy so adding more chip’s will actually just increase power consumption (as it always works).

Base fix for the ram problem is to do a kill of all not crucial apps once a week & second time a simple restart (in intervals between them in 3-4 day’s). Purgable kernel assets can also help a little.

I never said that it uses more RAM, I said that it can make use of it (i.e. it doesn’t go to waste)…

I haven’t actually run (too) big programs on android so I wouldn’t know. But I have run them on server boxes, which is why I’ve been using ECC ram there….

Having said that RAM, scales best when a new node is used (I was not talking of more chips but rather one where more ram was contained). So there’s much greater hope to get big amounts of ram in phones than it is to get server-grade processors. Basically that was part of my rant, I can live with a bit less processing power, but not with less ram.

BTW having big amounts of ram (also) ensures that memory management would always leave enough ram for new calls, so I fail to see how this becoming priority won’t actually help more problems than one.

Lastly yeah the malloc issue is a bottleneck of sorts, but scheduling android to kill long-lived apps once a week I won’t think that it will affect every-day performance. Maybe once a week your phone will feel slightly sluggish (until all assets/apps are loaded back to ram). But that would be an one-off thing.

What happens now, is that this thing happens 20 times a days, certainly it kills a lot more battery, than just having a ram module being “always on” standing there…

I meant that Android utilizes RAM better than Windows, therefore “needs” more (it will use all of it). Not that it is -necessarily- less efficient. You understood what I said the other way around…

I meant more in one chip by shrinking the existent ones. In other words instead of hunting 10nm SoCs we’re better off hunting 10nm RAM modules … anyway

I was merely telling people that it would be more beneficiary to use more ram (therefore use power there), instead of more processing power. It will actually let storage out of the equation for most things and you *know* how slow EMMC storage is, by far the slowest calls to come to completion.

So my point is “yeah, we need more ram”, but also “we need more ram, more than we need more CPU power”. You’d see people salivating here over the SoC used, but completely ignore that 3GB can actually bottleneck it as it would force it to make the long-round trip (RAM to CPU, CPU to Storage, Storage to RAM, instead of CPU to RAM and RAM to CPU)

That’s exactly that I said, swap is used on Linux where the whole page is written on persistent, on android only few important data are kept.

I was arguing with him about the difference between android and Linux because he thinks is the same

This is classic trolling – and probably biggest EoT ever.

Eristic – you’re not a champ here …

Well there is lot of differences between Tham & I named up one of them. 😛

I’d like to know your point of view:

Do you belong in that category that thinks that 3GB of RAM is not enough in 2016 and we need more and more like 6-8GB?

Stef, please explain me why killing an app seems such awful thing to you?

I use a navigation app in the morning and then when I came back home I don’t need it anymore. Guess what I do?

I kill it.

What’s the deal on keeping that App to occupy RAM?

Real life and experiments are two different things

If you actually had the memory to house it, why kill even that? The next morning it would instantly load and choose a new direction.

It saves time not to to kill apps (if you have the memory size for them). BTW Google advice’s against it, they want us to let memory management do the killing.

Having said the above it’s preferable to kill it nowadays so that to make space for other apps, but again, that’s all because you don’t have some ridiculously big amount of ram.

” I can’t really see what anyone can load in 8GB RAM from android apps functionalities”

Basically everything you do on your phone. It will become a ramdisk of sorts. God why is it so hard for you people to understand this, it’s a simple argument. The only reason that it became so long is because you pull figures out of a hat.

For example the 3GB is completely arbitrary. Have you actually measured it? Because I bet you you are bottlenecked and your emmc storage works ALL the time. Use an 8GB android device , see how everything happens instantaneously and then tell me 3GB is enough”

I agree, I never disputed that, the user above -though- thought that that’s exactly what I disputed, I think he’s knowingly trolling though. So please respond to him with care, by our discussions I know you’re more thoughtful than that.

You’re going to report him for disagreeing with you?

In fact I used a very frequent use of the word. The car “needs” petroil, does not imply that it is inefficient in doing so.

Android can make use of all its ram, the more you give it, the more it will use, so it needs it. Windows Computers are not like that, which was exactly what I was referring to…

Want can’t be used in this situation. An operating system cannot want anything.

A consumer can want more than he actually needs.

Indeed, but I never even tried to argue the point of view of the consumer.

I only ever argued the pros and cons of different OSes and the way they use the resources. I don’t dabble with opinions only with facts.

In other words what a consumer wants or needs is irrelevant to me. What is relevant to me is the *fact* that more RAM plays greater role than more processing power in an android system.

That’s the only angle I ever argued for…

I have not watched it.

Having a little one means that we can only watch cartoons lately.

Ask me about Paw Patrol,Chugginton, and Peppa Pig and i can tell you everything!

No you argued specifically that phones need more RAM because they are Linux. That is the exception that he had. Android will perform better with more RAM but it isn’t a need, it is a want. I still use a 1GB Nexus 7 that works fine, it would be faster with more but it isn’t a need.

A phone is on all day long, ram is an always-on component so you don’t use extra power to have it filled with relevant information instead of irrelevant. Like you said “unused ram is useless ram”. It will helps with your battery if your CPU only speak with ram if needed instead of the storage (less “roads to travel”, storage rarely needs to consume any battery, etc)

His point is that I believe that Linux is inefficient even after I explained him that that’s not what I believe. Of course I didn’t agree with his assessment, it was a strawman.

The trolling came that even though I corrected him, (by telling him that I agree that Linux machines are efficient and that he understood what I wrote the other way around), he continued posting that Linux is efficient (yeah I know, duh. I was making a comparison of Windows and Linux ram management, what anything else has to do with anything?

BTW I account Linux more ram efficient -partly- *exactly* because it needs more ram… It makes better use of it, so…

Yeah, that was the conversation I had with Lazar. And there’s solution for that too. Once a week android can drop long-ran processes (as I’m sure -in fact it does anyway).

The fact that memory was not build to play the role of storage doesn’t mean that it can’t eventually be that (for more things than one).

For example now that RAM becomes cheaper and cheaper and it can finally house most of users’ processes that’s a very real use-case that is going to solve a million problems (the need for expensive storage, or for bigger batteries, etc).

So yeah, I’m not saying that RAM should become a RAMdisk, but rather play a much bigger role. The experiment that I’m telling people to try is to install RemixOS on a 8GB+ PC and see how FAR faster Android becomes …

Truth is that Android is a “consumption OS”. It needs fast forms of storage more than it needs fast processing.

In fact in anything *other* than games a CPU mostly loads and unloads stuff from memory, it’s seriously underused, especially if you have great amounts of RAM.

I hope I’m *now* understood instead of misunderstood (as I initially was).

BTW it’s not just 1 second. It’s 1+ seconds times a thousands, because during the day you load and unload stuff from/to memory ALL-the-time because of RAM limitations that modern phones have.

That’s it i just spat my popcorn out i am laughing so hard right now

I always have free RAM (400-500 Mo out of 2Go) because i regularly kill unused apps. Why ? Because many apps operate background and eat battery like fucking cancer, and because i’m some kind of optimization freak (like a japanese blacksmith with his steel or a psycho milf on a diet with her calories).

This allows me to have clean RAM, low battery consumption and still sync my personal and professional mails/calendar all day long without the fear of having 5% battery left @10PM.

Your conception of RAM usage would lead us to build phones with as much RAM as ROM. I still don’t get it.

BTW sorry for this late reply ^^

It won’t.

It will be 5 just like the Mi3 and Mi4. The Note line is for big screens.