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by imjoshdean 4612 days ago
I'm not going to hold my breath on the actual RAM number until we see an iFixit teardown. Due to just the shear size, the iPad mini has always had half the ram as the regular sized iPad. I wouldn't be surprised if the Air had 2GB and the Mini had 1 GB.
2 comments

From the review -

>The iPad Air, like the iPhone 5s, ships with 1GB of LPDDR3 memory. Apple frowns upon dissection of review samples but I think it’s a safe bet that we’re not talking about a PoP (Package-on-Package) configuration but rather discrete, external DRAM here. It’s also probably a safe bet that even the iPad mini with Retina Display will ship with 1GB of memory as well.

> Due to just the shear size, the iPad mini has always had half the ram as the regular sized iPad.

Might that not have also been due to the iPad mini having a non-Retina display? Or does system RAM not matter much for that?

It matters. You have to hold lots of double resolution images in memory, for example, which obviously eats memory up fast.
I wasn't sure how Retina vs. non-Retina apps behave in memory. Some apps presumably ship both sizes of assets, in which case the OS could load only the smaller ones into memory. But if an app only ships Retina assets, would those go straight into memory, or is the OS clever enough to resize them dynamically and throw that into memory?