The new norm in smartphones could be 8GB of memory, thanks to Samsung

With Samsung in the midst of the biggest smartphone debacle of the past few years, which involved a complete recall of the Note 7, it’s easy to forget that the company has also been working on new memory chips. These new chips combine a 10nm chipset with 8GB of LPDDR4, making them the most compact, high-capacity memory chips in the world, with the potential to bring huge volatile storage to smartphones.

While the world and his dog might know Samsung as one of the most prominent smartphone manufacturers, it has its fingers in a lot of pies. One of them is memory chip development, and its latest creation could very well be the next-generation update we have been looking forward to.

Internally, the chip holds four, 16 gigabit LPDDR4 memory chips, operating at as much as twice the speed of traditional DDR4 DRAM found in PCs — and offering as much as 4.26 gigabytes per second. This would improve multitasking capabilities and make it easier for heftier uses like virtual reality and 4K video streaming.

If it is any indication of how console gaming went after the major systems upgraded to 8GB of system RAM, we can expect larger smartphone game textures and larger download sizes because of it.

As impressive as this development is — 8GB of RAM only recently became commonplace in desktop gaming PCs — PocketNow raises an interesting caution. While 8GB of RAM in a phone sounds great, we still have not seen Samsung’s 6GB handset, the Galaxy C9. The 6GB chips were announced back in 2015, so just because Samsung claims to have built the world’s first 8GB LPDDR4 chip, we are not likely to see them in smartphones anytime soon.

The first smartphone we could realistically expect to come sporting the new hardware standard is the Galaxy Note 8, which is scheduled for a 2017 release, though Samsung is mulling over killing off that brand altogether after the recent fiasco. We will have to wait and see.