What does RAM do, and why is it so important?

You don’t have to step far into the world of computing and digital technology to find yourself sinking into a swamp of acronyms, abbreviations and technical jargon.

Most consumers don’t know their HTTP from their HTML, let alone the difference between PEEK and POKE.

Fortunately, some computing terminology is easier to understand, especially when it relates to basic elements of computer processing.

Memory is a good example, since even a technological Luddite will appreciate that computers, smartphones and other digital devices need to remember a lot of things at once.

This short-term memory is known as random access memory, or RAM. Without it, computers simply wouldn’t function.

So what does RAM do, and how as consumers should we evaluate its presence and performance?

RAM jam

Whenever you turn on a computer or wake a mobile device from sleep, everything which happens subsequently will pass through the RAM chip/s installed in it.

Comprised of a series of integrated circuits, storage cells and input/output chips, RAM provides short-term memory to a digital device while it’s in operation.

It might remember the last hundred keystrokes in a word processing document, the last hundred bullets you fired in Call of Duty or the last hundred instructions in a photo editing package.

It encompasses any data the device has processed which might be required again – such as the Undo function in Word or the airbrush modifications made to a digital photograph.

Once you close that software package down or send the device to sleep, however, those modifications will either be saved or lost.

RAM is exclusively short-term memory, and is therefore somewhat volatile.

Imagine editing a document just before a power cut. If changes hadn’t been saved (either onto a hard drive or into the cloud), they’d have been stored in RAM, and would be instantly erased when the power was lost.

As such, you need to treat RAM separately from other device attributes like storage capacities or the presence of CPU and GPU processors.

How is RAM calculated?

Memory is calculated and counted using the bits and bytes used to transmit all digital data in a language computers can understand.

Early computers had RAM levels measured in kilobytes, but these were basic machines in every sense, often powered by the relatively simplistic BASIC programming language.

The amount of individual bytes of RAM required in modern devices is in the billions – gigabytes.

You’ll often see smartphones and laptops advertised with 8, 16 or 32GB of RAM.

In essence, the more RAM a device has, the faster it can work and the more tasks it’ll be able to process simultaneously.

This is great for people who play immersive or complex games, and those of us who demand multiple platforms running simultaneously on a particular device.

It’s also helpful as operating systems become more complicated and function-heavy, since a great deal of any device’s RAM will be dedicated to running the device itself.

A shortage of RAM at any given moment doesn’t cause a device to break down, but it’ll run more slowly and possibly become unstable with a higher likelihood of crashing.

As consumers, therefore, higher quantities of RAM are highly beneficial, since they suggest the day-to-day experience of using that device ought to be smoother and more robust.