The RAM race heats up: RedMagic 8S Pro to be announced on July 5 with 24GB RAM

There’s the 24 Hours of Le Mans, there’s the Indy 500, the F1, and finally, there’s another high-powered race: the 24GB RAM race. For now it’s contained in China, but who knows when it’s gonna break out and ‘infect’ the rest of the brands!

Mere 24 hours after we reported on OPPO, OnePlus and Realme’s rumored plans to manufacture a 24GB RAM phone, a local competitor is ready to present its own RAM goliath. On July 5 at a China-held event, Nubia will announce the RedMagic 8S Pro (via mysmartprice), equipped with 24GB RAM. That’s not some sort of virtual RAM like with Samsung’s RAM Plus feature, found in Galaxy devices, but actual physical chips, claims the company on Weibo.

What else is there?

Nubia packs the RedMagic 8S Pro with a boosted processor: an overclocked version of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. They call it ‘Leading version’ and present it to have 3.36GHz peak clock speed (for comparison, the standard model peaks at 3.19GHz). On a side note, Samsung’s Galaxy S23 series also come equipped with a ‘clocked’ Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 version chip.

The GPU is the third thing that gets turbocharged. Qualcomm’s Adreno 740 goes from 680MHz to 719MHz. The ‘regular’ non-boosted Adreno 740 is regarded as one of the best (if not *the* best) mobile GPUs these days. As shown in our Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 vs 8 Gen 1 comparison, the Adreno 740 GPU is 25% faster and 45% more power efficient than the previous high-end chip, the Adreno 730.

RedMagic 8S Pro’s other specifications are expected to be the same as in the RedMagic 8 Pro non-S version: most probably a 6.8-inch AMOLED display, 120Hz refresh rate, 50MP triple rear camera setup, 16MP second-gen under-display front camera, 6000mAh battery, plus 65W fast charging.

Battle of the specs

So, do you need a device with that much memory? For the majority of today’s users, the topic is extremely short, actually: you don’t need a 24GB RAM smartphone. Maybe in the (not-so-distant) future, if apps become more resource-intensive, there will be a demand for 24GB RAM devices.

Today, however, it is typical for high-end Android phones to have between 8 and 12GB of RAM, and that's proven sufficient for serious gaming, swift multitasking, and heavy photo/video editing. With iPhones, it’s a different story since Apple has designed iOS in quite a different fashion than the RAM-hungry Android. Case in point: the iPhone 14 Pro Max delivers outstanding performance with just 6GB of RAM on board.

The lack of necessity for a 24GB RAM phone is, however, not a good enough argument. The brands are driven by humans, and humans are driven by the necessity of pushing the limits. That’s just the way it is!