Pixel 9’s Hidden AI Benefit: More RAM for Everyone

If you’re suffering from AI-everything fatigue, you’re likely not alone. Nor am I, but there’s one great deal from AI on smartphones that we’re not continuing to talk about enough, especially when it comes to the Pixel 9: processor leaps and extra RAM. The Pixel 9 – a device with no camera – delivers all the AI ‘gold’ that you paid for, even if you, a Pixel 9 owner, probably won’ of these new AI features.

One step back, though, I will concede: that there is plenty of effective AI (done well) that works effectively, that’s useful, relevant and possibly even life-changing. The set of smart calling features in the Pixel, the Google Recorder, or even Samsung’s document summarisation – those are great examples of good AI in action. But the other kind of AI features – the artificially generated wallpapers and emojis, or the tone-modifying tools for messages, or the dumb photo-editing tricks such as blurring your mum’s head or erasing her feet – those are a dime a dozen, and I’ve typically tried them a few times before promptly forgetting about them for everyday use.

That’s why I haven’t been taking the leaks about the Pixel 9 quite seriously, as if a set of new features for the new set of phones all coded with the Google AI badge might somehow be better. A tool that analyses your screenshots, a studio for automatically generating images, an Add Me feature that lets you add yourself as a subject to a group shot – none of these stand alone. But one thing I believe hasn’t been emphasised enough is how this AI push is likely to kick some decades-old smartphone companies into a gear shift where they have to seriously up their hardware game after a few years of stagnation.

This boost in RAM for the Pixel 9 phones will weigh in at 4GB, hopefully useful to all, whether AI powered or not.

The base Pixel 9 is expected to have 12GB of RAM (up from 8GB on the Pixel 8), and the Pixel 9 Pro as well as the 9 Pro XL are tipped to jump to 16GB of RAM (both up from 12GB on the current Pixel 8 Pro). In other words, 4GB more on each of these, and good money bets that consumers will want to benefit from them, even if they don’t end up using much actual AI functionality.

Despite saying for years that 8GB were absolutely sufficient (‘I only need the browser and Twitter,’ as my colleague Gary Sims is wont to say), his recent performance tests show that the leading flagships could benefit from a little extra headroom. 12GB might become the sweet spot if you want to play a game, shoot a video, surf the web and do more with an extremely capable smartphone in your pocket. Then there’s AI and crushing compute…

More RAM means that the Pixel 9 series is much more future-proof than the Pixel 8 series, especially if you keep it plugging along for its entire seven-year support window.

Thus, outfitted with 12GB RAM, the Pixel 9 should strike the optimal sweet spot for all general use, and moreover run Gemini Nano on-device – which has also lingered in some sense in beta on the Pixel 8 due to its 8GB RAM-powered legs.

And with 16GB of RAM, both the upcoming Pixel 9 Pro and Pro XL should be prepared to handle current and future use cases for many years to come. Indeed, these phones will have at least seven years of updates, so you know you’ll need that RAM headroom someday within a span of four or five years from now, and you won’t regret having that little extra headroom even if you don’t end up caring for a lot of AI features. For the people who do, though, that 4GB of bonus RAM will prove very handy in a couple of iterations of on-device Gemini Nano down the road.

But you will have noticed that I’ve barely mentioned the processor. We can expect the new Pixels to ship with a new Tensor G4 processsor, but unlike many other phones, which are upgrading their chipset to another level in order to support a future full of AI models and computation tasks, the Tensor G4 should not be a big improvement over the Tensor G3. My colleague Kamila wrote a great article explaining why Tensor G4 is not the chip Google wanted, and Gary’s video above explains the same in video format.

Long story short – and you can skip it if you’d like – Google can’t get the in-house chipset it wanted for the Pixel 9 lineout in time, and had to make a very slightly improved version of the Tensor G3 at the very last second.

The Pixel 9 got its AI bonus in the RAM upgrade while the Pixel 10 should give everybody a processor boost.

Meanwhile, buyers of a Pixel 9 won’t gain much from Google’s AI-driven processor advances, but the Pixel 10 will be more capable – and more future-proof – with the first Google-designed processor. For its second-gen Tensor processor, set to ship in the Pixel 10 next year, Google needs to skip the hop to Samsung’s process and move to TSMC’s far more efficient foundry, add a faster CPU and GPU, and make room for another new-generation TPU for AI and another new DSP for enhanced photo smarts. So, again, it’s a huge bonus to you whether you care to turn the knobs of the AI or not.

This is one of the least appreciated side-effects of the AI uprising. And you know what? If we don’t end up with the radical new forms of sociality and homemaking that some futurists are building into their AI features, at least we can reap some of the benefits.