iOS Training in HSR Layout

Why iPhones Run Smoother With Less Power? 

The battle between Android and iOS is going strong to this date and you might have plenty of reasons to be on either side of the frontlines. However, this doesn’t stop the crowd in general to continuously compare the two.

There have been many bases of comparison like which of the two has better applications or more attractive smartphone features, but you might not have noticed that the iOS devices use much less RAM than their Android counterparts. Even with 1/3rd of the RAM that Android devices have, Apple is able to develop phones which are much faster than their closest competitors. 

Superior Chipset

In 2010, Apple launched its first in-house system-on-chip (SoC) handset, the iPad with the A4 chipset. Consequently, in 2013, they launched the A7, their first 64-bit mobile processor. This left their competitors not only flat-footed, but also astounded! With the A10 launched in 2016, Apple mopped the floor with Samsung Exynos and Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, yet again, when it came to single-threaded operations.

One fact that cannot be denied is that both the chipsets do perform faster than the A10, when it comes to multi-core operations. However, the Galaxy S8 does have four high-performance and four high-efficiency cores as compared to the two high-performance and two high-efficiency cores in iPhone 7. This means that Android needs double the cores to even become comparable to Apple’s performance. This simply illustrates that Apple’s efficiency cores are way more efficient than that of Android.

The A11, launched in 2017, had two high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores, which were way faster and a lot more efficient than their earlier versions. In 2018, Apple unveiled its latest chip for the new batch of iPhones: the A12 Bionic. It was the first 7nm chip in the industry, which was the smartest and the most powerful chip that a smartphone had ever had.

As was the case with 2018 smartphones, Apple again used the 7 nanometer chip design in their recently unveiled iPhone 11 models. But, the company’s A13 SoC is manufactured using a more advanced process than its competitors. Apple has claimed that the A13 Bionic chip, is the fastest Central Processing Unit (CPU) ever embedded into a smartphone. To top that, the company also revealed that the A13 has the fastest Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), in their iPhone 11 models.

Why Does iOS Use Less Memory Than Android?

• If we look at the iPhone from any generation, and compare its RAM with their Android counterparts that launched in the same year, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Apple phones have much less RAM than the Android ones. The reason why Android apps need more RAM is because they are memory hoggers.
• Memory management on a modern device is quite complex. In modern operating systems like iOS and Android, there is a system where a section of RAM is given to each app. Any remaining unoccupied RAM is free but there is inefficiency in keeping ‘free’ RAM. So what the device does is, it uses the free RAM for caching.
• If any more memory is required by some other app, then the caching process is abandoned to reallocate the memory to the relevant application. This is known as ‘available RAM’. The modern operating systems like iOS and Android have all kinds of systems to re-use the unoccupied RAM.
• Resident Set Size (RSS) is a good measure to know how much RAM is actually needed to run an application. On both iOS and Android, people tend to multi-task and switch between apps. When you move away from a current app, it changes from being a foreground app to a background app. These background apps are then treated differently.
• Obviously, the background and the foreground apps need some amount of RAM to keep them running, but what if there is not enough RAM available for all these apps to run? Well, then the OS uses a method of compression. The space saved by compressing the app data will then be used as available RAM.
• A study done by Gary Sims stated that when 3 apps were opened in Nexus 5, one of the unused background apps was terminated. However, if the same apps are opened on an iOS device, the applications run smoothly when switched back again to the foreground.
• This means that in practice, the Android app doesn’t use more memory, iOS just has a better way of handling the background apps and repurposing memory. It seems that the Android apps which move to the background use as much RAM as they do when they were in the foreground. In an iOS device, the background apps use much less memory and keep enough available memory so that it runs instantly when switched to the foreground.
• iOS has a different approach to memory management. While Android’s memory is managed by the operating system, iOS memory is handled by the applications themselves. iOS apps automatically allocates and deallocates memory as needed. Moreover, iOS doesn’t rely on virtual machines like java, to create apps like Android does.

To conclude it as succinctly as possible, the fact that iPhones runs smother. Lesser RAM in iphone doesn’t mean that they are inefficient in performance, by any measure.