Everything about iPad RAM – Part 1

Everything about iPad RAM

Everything about iPad RAM - Part 1

It’s undeniable that the tablet now has its own league in the tech arena, and because of its quality and reliability iPad is always considered as a winner in the battle of tablet made by the giant tablet manufacturers.

One of the most important parts of any iPad is its RAM but there is little information available about it. Thus, we decided to go over everything about iPad RAM in this post and explain how it influences your tablet speed and performance.

What is RAM?

RAM (pronounced ramm, an acronym for Random Access Memory) is the short-memory of your device. Every time you request a task by tapping on the screen, your tablet needs to store and read data from RAM. Without RAM even very simple tasks such as opening a webpage would take a long time on your iPad or would not be possible at all. The reason is that your iPad needs to remember things to respond to your requests. For example, when you want to play an audio track on your tablet, the operating system loads the track bit by bit into the RAM and runs a series of instructions that are also kept in the RAM. If the RAM is not available (or you have not enough RAM) CPU of your tablet has to access data from the device’s slower hard drive (or SSD) all the time. In that case, you probably have to wait forever to shot an enemy in a game or even watch a favorite YouTube video on your iPad!

RAM is a volatile memory, meaning that it forgets everything when the power goes off. As a result, contrary to the storage, the same amount of RAM can be cleaned and used again and again and you don’t need to have very large RAM on your device to get things to work smoothly.

if you have the right amount of RAM on your device apps will load and run smoother and give you the feeling that your iPad is running faster. On the other side, having not having enough memory will turn your expensive iPad to a sluggish useless toy.

What type of RAM is used in iPad?

All iPads come with “mobile DDR”, a type of Dynamic Double Data Rate RAM that is optimized for use on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. This type of RAM, also called Low-Power DDR (LPDDR), has several features making them suitable for mobile devices. First, the size of LPDR RAMs is smaller and their channels are narrower. This helps them fit well into the limited space available on a phone or tablet. Second, LPDDR RAMs run faster than standard RAMs and offer a better performance consuming less power. They have several low-power operating states that lead to better battery life for your device.

Despite that Apple always denies to make official statements about the details of its products, thanks to leakers and product teardowns, now we know which model of RAM is installed on different iPads. For example, when iPad 7 went under the screwdriver of ifixit experts, An Apple A10 Fusion APL1W24 SoC layered over Micron D9WQC 3 GB LPDDR4 SDRAM showed up along with other specs. Another teardown by them revealed that iPhone 11 Pro 2018 hides two pieces of 2 GB mobile-DDR RAM (4 GB total) under its cover, which is an 8MBT9 D9WHG LPDR made by Apple partner company, micron.

 

References