Hi…
Maybe this is a stupid question and just a lack of info but…
Here it goes:
Got my new FP3 today after 4 weeks of waiting. Very Happy
But as soon as I cheked through the phone I stumbled over something…
It says that my FP3 only has 3596MB of total RAM.
So is 3,5GB of RAM the regular and OS/shadow stuff sniffs 500MB, or should I return it instantly?
Cause tech specs say there should be 4GB RAM? o.0
Was not able to find something about that in a quick search so I came here for “professional” advise…
…did some research, and then I rembembered that I somehow knew what was going on from back in the days as 64bit and more than 4GB of RAM were an issue.
…so basically as far as I understood it´s sort of a memory remapping issue. As on PC or other Systems/OS’s u can turn this on in BIOS and the OS has to support it as well, to kind of extend and remap memory adresses. I rember that this was an issue on PC like 10 years ago when u go to 4GB RAM or more, but since 64bit became the PC standard this issue became “obsolete”.
…just didn’t know this is still a thing on android, as there are phones out there with 8GB and more…
…but still I’m really falling in love with my new FP3
The memory you see reported is the memory available in userspace. The rest is system-reserved in a number of ways, for a list see for example this article (under " How your phone uses its RAM", which concludes in “All this is why the available RAM listing in settings isn’t the same as the total amount of RAM installed inside your phone.”).
In this case the discrepancy has nothing to do with memory address limits that occur in 32 bit systems.
At least in PC’s it is quite common that hardware reserves some RAM for itself. For instance, GPU’s that are integrated into a CPU have no video RAM of their own, and therefore steal a bit of system RAM. I don’t know how phone hardware manages memory, but I guess the same thing happens in the FP3 as well, given the GPU is integrated into the Qualcomm SoC.
I think it’s probably also a conversion thing. You probably know that e.g. a 8GB USB-Stick only has like 7.6GB space on it. This is because the manufacturer defines 8GB as 8x1000MB = 8 Gigabytes. Your device however probably uses 8 Gibibytes = 8x1024 Mebibytes (one Mebibyte being 1024 Kibibytes and so on), since 1024 is a power of 2.
