4 ms·

This might also explains why Google seems more and more interested in designing its own chips for mobile devices, just like Apple. That and the underwhelming o

This might also explains why Google seems more and more interested in designing its own chips for mobile devices, just like Apple. That and the underwhelming offering on Android compared to what Apple has been able to deliver.

colechristensen 10y ago
Why is it underwhelming? What do people do with phones? I exchange text, sound, and pictures with people. Sometimes I play stupid games. The sound/pictures/text sharing long ago hit a limit where theres a big question as to why a person needs a faster processor. Increased watts per compute helps, sure. But what else? What besides bloat requires a Moore's law increase in a phone processor? What do I want to do with my phone that I don't yet know I want?
- notalaser 10y ago
  > What besides bloat requires a Moore's law increase in a phone processor? Marketing departments.
- jobigoud 10y ago
  > What do I want to do with my phone that I don't yet know I want? Untethered VR and AR. Rendering views in stereo for an extremely pixel-dense screen (>4K) at the highest frequency possible (>90Hz) while processing camera feeds and depth sensors for positional tracking (>90Hz).
- a3n 10y ago
  > Why is it underwhelming? What do people do with phones? What did people do with phones in the 1890s? Even your closed set is much, much more than that. What did people do with computers in the 50s, or PCs in the 80s? We do a lot more than that now. With greater capability comes more, even if we don't yet know what "more" will be.
  - gakada 10y ago
    Mobile devices are ideal candidates to be thin clients, because they are battery powered. If most instances of greater capability can be implemented as a thin client, then it's not CPU performance that is the bottleneck, but mobile ISPs and aged infrastructure.
  - colechristensen 10y ago
    Windows 95 is 26 years old, my first computer ran it. It's been a quarter of a century and I don't do anything with a shiny new MacBook Pro that I didn't do with Windows 95. I browse the web, read news and comments, watch videos, exchange text with people. Sure, the video resolution is better but that has a lot more to do with the network than with the computer hardware. The UI is a little shinier, but I'm not enabled to do anything new that I couldn't do before. If I don't buy a new computer every few years, what I have will be nearly worthless because software has a funny habit of finding ways to spend all available resources, even if it does most of the same things. I just don't think I would be that disappointed if I was still using Win 95. > With greater capability comes more, even if we don't yet know what "more" will be. If you discount network speed and pixel density, "more" hasn't been much in 25 years as far as I can see. Miniturization means I can carry a laptop around with me, ok. Likewise with phones. Android and iOS are about 8 years old now. What can we do that we couldn't then? _not much_ as far as I can see. We're definitely past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to resolution, and near or already at the point where physically your eye can't couldn't tell if the pixel density was higher. So what's left?
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  For one, support of larger interfaces. A mobile processor from five years ago is going to have a rough time trying to run 4k GUIs at 60fps.
  - colechristensen 10y ago
    We're kind of done with this now though, right? I can pick a mobile device with a tiny screen no more than a few inches to a monster the size of a largish book. I can get pixel density finer than my eyes are able to detect. There's not much room left for improvement. And likewise not much else has improved since iOS/Android were released. What I mean by "improved" is real differences in the kinds of things you can do.
    - jsprogrammer 10y ago
      I doubt many pieces dropping into a bin right now could handle something like 32k on a 16-inch tablet.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  I sometimes browse the web with my phone, and it's quite often painful.
- comex 10y ago
  > What besides bloat requires a Moore's law increase in a phone processor? Here are some relatively boring answers: AI stuff - including, among other things, voice recognition, other parts of virtual assistants, photo capture (which involves a lot of processing in modern smartphones to improve the image), and photo auto-tagging - is always happy to guzzle extra cycles to improve accuracy a few percent. Some of this can be (and is) done on the cloud instead, but at the cost of latency, availability (when reception is poor), and, of course, privacy. Much better to do it on-device where possible. Games, even short of VR/AR (which is definitely a "I don't yet know I want" candidate), similarly often push the limits of the GPU to achieve graphical fidelity. True, the kinds of simple, repetitive, low production value games that tend to grace the top charts of mobile app stores today have little need for increased fidelity. But I think that phenomenon is more about market dynamics than inherent to the form factor. Dedicated portable consoles like the 3DS have many excellent games that would so benefit, and while some depend on more precise controls than available on mobile (i.e. buttons), many do not, e.g. RPGs, and of course smartphones have their own unique input methods. (Given that the 3DS has atrocious graphics, games clearly don't need good graphics to be fun, but they can still benefit from them, as shown by home consoles/PC gaming - anyway, larger and higher resolution screens increase the baseline level of detail required for acceptability.) It's perhaps unsurprising that both of these examples tend to rely on the GPU and other specialized processors more than the CPU.
- tomatsu 10y ago
  Yea, my $100 low-budget phone is fast enough. I can use it as satnav, watch 1080p videos, browse the internet, and so on. I can even play some 3D games and things like that. I'd like the battery to last longer. 14 days - like my dumb phone. That would be a meaningful improvement.
  - tluyben2 10y ago
    Oukitel k10000. Acquired taste but it has excellent battery life.
- on_and_off 10y ago
  For this use case, phones are kinda powerful enough. Not quite though : applying photo filters (even just HDR+ in order to improve the picture) can take a lot of time. I am not sure whether Prisma slowest is due to mobile SOCs or would be helped if they switched to a better implementation though (Google Photos & Snapseed rely heavily on Renderscript and have been able to deliver very fast filters that way) HDR+ is still slow though .. and I don't think it is unrealistic to ask to see the resulting picture in less than one second. So better SOCs would help there Also, for motion design, fluidity is very important : if you miss frames, the illusion is shattered. And that's also important for a lambda user, having things move into place helps in understanding what is going on. When you delete a mail (or have a new one), having the list of emails move into place instead of blinking from one state to the other helps the user understand the event. Same thing for screen transitions. Android is not quite there yet (and to be fair neither is iOS, it is even surprisingly worse in many regards). Again, it is not entirely clear how much of this is due to software (not java, but the OS debuts as a camera OS, then a blackberry competitor and only after that as a modern mobile OS) but surely better single core performances would help accomplish this and Apple wrecks Android in that specific area.

colechristensen 10y ago

Why is it underwhelming? What do people do with phones? I exchange text, sound, and pictures with people. Sometimes I play stupid games. The sound/pictures/text sharing long ago hit a limit where theres a big question as to why a person needs a faster processor. Increased watts per compute helps, sure. But what else? What besides bloat requires a Moore's law increase in a phone processor? What do I want to do with my phone that I don't yet know I want?

notalaser 10y ago
> What besides bloat requires a Moore's law increase in a phone processor? Marketing departments.
jobigoud 10y ago
> What do I want to do with my phone that I don't yet know I want? Untethered VR and AR. Rendering views in stereo for an extremely pixel-dense screen (>4K) at the highest frequency possible (>90Hz) while processing camera feeds and depth sensors for positional tracking (>90Hz).
a3n 10y ago
> Why is it underwhelming? What do people do with phones? What did people do with phones in the 1890s? Even your closed set is much, much more than that. What did people do with computers in the 50s, or PCs in the 80s? We do a lot more than that now. With greater capability comes more, even if we don't yet know what "more" will be.
- gakada 10y ago
  Mobile devices are ideal candidates to be thin clients, because they are battery powered. If most instances of greater capability can be implemented as a thin client, then it's not CPU performance that is the bottleneck, but mobile ISPs and aged infrastructure.
- colechristensen 10y ago
  Windows 95 is 26 years old, my first computer ran it. It's been a quarter of a century and I don't do anything with a shiny new MacBook Pro that I didn't do with Windows 95. I browse the web, read news and comments, watch videos, exchange text with people. Sure, the video resolution is better but that has a lot more to do with the network than with the computer hardware. The UI is a little shinier, but I'm not enabled to do anything new that I couldn't do before. If I don't buy a new computer every few years, what I have will be nearly worthless because software has a funny habit of finding ways to spend all available resources, even if it does most of the same things. I just don't think I would be that disappointed if I was still using Win 95. > With greater capability comes more, even if we don't yet know what "more" will be. If you discount network speed and pixel density, "more" hasn't been much in 25 years as far as I can see. Miniturization means I can carry a laptop around with me, ok. Likewise with phones. Android and iOS are about 8 years old now. What can we do that we couldn't then? _not much_ as far as I can see. We're definitely past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to resolution, and near or already at the point where physically your eye can't couldn't tell if the pixel density was higher. So what's left?
jsprogrammer 10y ago
For one, support of larger interfaces. A mobile processor from five years ago is going to have a rough time trying to run 4k GUIs at 60fps.
- colechristensen 10y ago
  We're kind of done with this now though, right? I can pick a mobile device with a tiny screen no more than a few inches to a monster the size of a largish book. I can get pixel density finer than my eyes are able to detect. There's not much room left for improvement. And likewise not much else has improved since iOS/Android were released. What I mean by "improved" is real differences in the kinds of things you can do.
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    I doubt many pieces dropping into a bin right now could handle something like 32k on a 16-inch tablet.
tedunangst 10y ago
I sometimes browse the web with my phone, and it's quite often painful.
comex 10y ago
> What besides bloat requires a Moore's law increase in a phone processor? Here are some relatively boring answers: AI stuff - including, among other things, voice recognition, other parts of virtual assistants, photo capture (which involves a lot of processing in modern smartphones to improve the image), and photo auto-tagging - is always happy to guzzle extra cycles to improve accuracy a few percent. Some of this can be (and is) done on the cloud instead, but at the cost of latency, availability (when reception is poor), and, of course, privacy. Much better to do it on-device where possible. Games, even short of VR/AR (which is definitely a "I don't yet know I want" candidate), similarly often push the limits of the GPU to achieve graphical fidelity. True, the kinds of simple, repetitive, low production value games that tend to grace the top charts of mobile app stores today have little need for increased fidelity. But I think that phenomenon is more about market dynamics than inherent to the form factor. Dedicated portable consoles like the 3DS have many excellent games that would so benefit, and while some depend on more precise controls than available on mobile (i.e. buttons), many do not, e.g. RPGs, and of course smartphones have their own unique input methods. (Given that the 3DS has atrocious graphics, games clearly don't need good graphics to be fun, but they can still benefit from them, as shown by home consoles/PC gaming - anyway, larger and higher resolution screens increase the baseline level of detail required for acceptability.) It's perhaps unsurprising that both of these examples tend to rely on the GPU and other specialized processors more than the CPU.
tomatsu 10y ago
Yea, my $100 low-budget phone is fast enough. I can use it as satnav, watch 1080p videos, browse the internet, and so on. I can even play some 3D games and things like that. I'd like the battery to last longer. 14 days - like my dumb phone. That would be a meaningful improvement.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  Oukitel k10000. Acquired taste but it has excellent battery life.
on_and_off 10y ago
For this use case, phones are kinda powerful enough. Not quite though : applying photo filters (even just HDR+ in order to improve the picture) can take a lot of time. I am not sure whether Prisma slowest is due to mobile SOCs or would be helped if they switched to a better implementation though (Google Photos & Snapseed rely heavily on Renderscript and have been able to deliver very fast filters that way) HDR+ is still slow though .. and I don't think it is unrealistic to ask to see the resulting picture in less than one second. So better SOCs would help there Also, for motion design, fluidity is very important : if you miss frames, the illusion is shattered. And that's also important for a lambda user, having things move into place helps in understanding what is going on. When you delete a mail (or have a new one), having the list of emails move into place instead of blinking from one state to the other helps the user understand the event. Same thing for screen transitions. Android is not quite there yet (and to be fair neither is iOS, it is even surprisingly worse in many regards). Again, it is not entirely clear how much of this is due to software (not java, but the OS debuts as a camera OS, then a blackberry competitor and only after that as a modern mobile OS) but surely better single core performances would help accomplish this and Apple wrecks Android in that specific area.