Unless you’re talking about critically endangered species, using up a sizable percentage of the world’s anything is an impressive benchmark. When that’s 25 percent of the world’s RAM, though — a critical component of every smartphone, tablet and ultrabook on Earth — only Apple is capable of placing those kinds of orders.

According to a new report from Taiwan-based market-research firm Trendforce, Apple is on track to buy 25 percent of the world’s DRAM in 2015. That’s one out of every four RAM chips sold.

DRAM, or dynamic random-access memory, is the non-storage-based memory on every iPhone, iPad and Mac. On the iPhone and iPad, Apple tops DRAM out at around 1GB, but on the Mac side of things, Apple regularly ships Macs with up to 16GB of RAM. On the PC side of things, more RAM generally makes computers run faster, although the performance gains that can be attained by plugging in a fresh stick of RAM have been obviated somewhat by the rise of solid state storage.

On the mobile side of things, whether more RAM leads to better performance is a trickier calculation. Apple is historically conservative with how much RAM it puts into its iOS devices, largely because more RAM takes up more power. That said, Apple is rumored to double the RAM of the iPad Air next year to a whopping 2GB, finally putting the tablet on par (at least spec-wise) with the RAM of many Android devices.

If Apple doubles its RAM across the board for iPhones and iPads next year, that would certainly explain why they need 25 percent of the world’s RAM to satisfy orders.

Source: Macworld