When buying a mobile phone, many people regard storage capacity and storage size as a very important purchase basis for reference, but few people care about their memory particles and what their standards are. In fact, there is a lot of tricky inside. Take thin and light notebooks as an example. At present, the common one is LPDDR3 and the other is DDR4. Many people think that "4" must be better than "3", so they believe that LPDDR3 must be inferior to DDR4. Of course, there is also a voice that supports LPDDR3, saying that LPDDR3 has lower power consumption and is conducive to the battery life of thin and light notebooks. Is this really the case? Is there a contrast between the two?

First of all, I want to say that LPDDR and DDR are two completely different product lines. DDR stands for Double Data Rate synchronous dynamic random access memory. Strictly speaking, DDR should be called DDR SDRAM. According to our observations on the storage market, DDR generation and DDR2 are rarely seen in the market, and DDR3 can still be seen in the field of set-top boxes, optical modems, and smart TVs.

The full name of LPDDR memory is Low Power Double Data Rate SDRAM, that is, low power double data rate memory. The speed of loading games and starting applications in daily use are all related to it. Since LPDDR was launched on the market later than DDR, the algebra of development was smaller, but it should be noted that LPDDR3 and DDR4 were released at the same time. They do not have a generation difference, but are positioned differently. The performance gap between the two is less than 10%, while LPDDR3 saves power than DDR4.

Let me talk about the issue of power consumption first. The power consumption of LPDDR3 is indeed lower than that of DDR4, but it is divided into use environment. The voltages of LPDDR3 and DDR4 are the same, both are 1.2V. When the load is low, LPDDR3 will reduce the voltage and frequency, which saves power than DDR4; when the load is high, it is hard to say. In theory, DDR4 saves power. Even under high load, LPDDR3 saves more power, and the savings are almost only about 1W, which is a drop in the bucket. To put it plainly, memory itself is not a big power consumer. It is said that LPDDR3 has a huge advantage in battery life compared to DDR4, which is a bit exaggerated. The impact of the two on battery life can be completely ignored.

Then there is performance. Although the power consumption of LPDDR3 is low, it does not mean that the performance of LPDDR3 is poor. There is a very important premise. The current models equipped with LPDDR3 are basically dual-channel, and many thin and light notebooks use single-channel DDR4. From the test data Look, the overall performance of dual-channel LPDDR3 is better than single-channel DDR4.

To sum up, desktop-level DDR memory is slower than the mobile terminal in terms of technology upgrades. LPDDR memory accounts for a relatively high proportion of power consumption in portable devices, and at the same time, it also bears the important responsibility of the identity of video memory. Technical iterations have an impact on the performance of mobile phones. And power consumption has a huge impact, so compared to DDR memory, LPDDR memory is more easily perceived by users.

Compared with mobile phones, computers are not so demanding and less sensitive to power consumption. Therefore, many thin and light notebooks still use LPDDR3 memory. Even the latest Intel processors only support LPDDR4X memory, while LPDDR5 is the best this year. The standard configuration of most flagship models, compared to DDR5, LPDDR5 will be seen on many mobile phones.