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I wish someone, anyone, would attempt to compete with Apple on single threaded performance in phone SoCs. Nobody is even trying. They all have business strategi
by modeless 3y ago
I wish someone, anyone, would attempt to compete with Apple on single threaded performance in phone SoCs. Nobody is even trying. They all have business strategies that prioritize other things.
- lnsru 3y agoThe question is if customers care about that. Crazy engineering is cool for sure, but it must be profitable too. In my environment people stopped buying newest phones years ago anyway.
- makapuf 3y agoPeople around me didnt buy the newest phones for benchmarks then either. They just wanted to have the last one, maybe a better screen or better camera, more storage or radio but cpu was way down the list.
- NovaDudely 3y agoI think that is the crux of it. New features are either not that big of a leap any more or are to nebulous to be a big attraction. Things like iPhone 14 satellite SOS calls. Neat tech but the audience for that is not huge.
- olliej 3y agoI would legit take same soc with improved process _purely_ for battery improvement with improved camera hardware at this point (but I don't play games on my phone, so ???). Even then the year to year improvements in camera hardware aren't as extreme as they were 5+ years ago.
- msh 3y agoRemoved comment, wrong parent
- wyldfire 3y ago> Nobody is even trying. Qualcomm has a $1.5B wager that they can, with the same engineers from Apple who helped them get where they are now. > . Qualcomm, and then Samsung decided licensing ARM’s cores would be easier than trying to outdo them. ... > ARM has a firm grip on the Android market. Samsung, Qualcomm, and MediaTek may develop their own SoCs, but all use CPU core designs from ARM (the company). But they've now reversed that decision, so we'll see whether they can change it.
- mschuster91 3y agoThe problem that Qualcomm and all the other ARM manufacturers have: they're impossible for tinkerers to get ahold of, outside of Raspberry Pi and a truckload of shitty, barely supported clones. And even then, the RPi still doesn't have the basics of PCIe working - in 2023 [1]. What. The. Fuck. Yes, Apple theoretically offers ARM devices, but they are not cheap, not extendable at all beyond USB-C and a ton of stuff doesn't work on Linux. In contrast, say I want to develop something on Intel? No problem, I head to Amazon, buy a CPU, a motherboard and try if that old ATX power supply is still working. I plug in whatever card I need and it Just Works. Steve Ballmer was right on track with "developers, developers, developers" - because if the ecosystem is crap or impossible to use for creative people on a low budget, guess what, they won't and go for the alternative. Linux started out on x86 for a reason, and Android blasted Windows Mobile (and everyone else but Apple) to pieces despite it being a solidly established player. A large part was due to neglected developers: outdated APIs, expensive and half-broken dev tools (developing for WinCE was a real pain in the proverbial arse), and a complete inability to even try to match Apple's innovation. Apple had a monopoly on capacitive touchscreens for years! If the ARM ecosystem players actually want to throw punches towards the unholy duopoly of Intel/AMD, they need to standardize on a common core of UEFI and get modular, working components out on the market. [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/external-graphics-cards-work-on-raspberry-pi https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/external-graphics-car...
- geerlingguy 3y agoTo be fair, the PCI Express bus on the current Pi was kind of an afterthought, only meant to work with a very limited set of devices, so I'm pretty sure nobody at Broadcom, and few in the design stages at Raspberry Pi, had ever tested more complex devices with it. It works fine in _most_ cases for simple devices (USB controllers, SATA, NVMe, WiFi, and the like), but really falls apart for more advanced devices (hardware RAID, GPU, TPU, etc.). And all Arm processors have to deal with cache coherence issues (which aren't a problem on X86), meaning some drivers (notably, AMD still) need to program for the different architecture (some patches exist but they're not perfect yet, and not in mainline Linux).
- sliken 3y agoOr memory bandwidth (800GB/sec). Or iGPU perf, which of course needs the above mentioned bandwidth. Or ML inference performance (5 tokens/sec with llama 65B).
- MikusR 3y agoThey are trying, but ARM is suing and demanding that the cores that are faster than ARM cortex ones be destroyed.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoHuge, GPU heavy SoCs are not economical without the huge volume, software ecosystem and margins of Apple. Smaller, higher clocked SoCs make sense for Android. And seperate CPUs+dGPUs are what users want on PCs. Intel and AMD tried to sell GPU heavy designs (eDRAM Broadwell, Vega M, Van Gogh (the Steam Deck SoC)) and PC OEMs unequivocally rejected them. And they are trying to make better cores, but again they have to balance die area and target servers and cheap consumer PCs with the same cores.
- huijzer 3y agoI think the main benefit of joining two dies together via some advanced interconnect is the latency. Memory lookups are much quicker on Apple Silicon which, in turn, avoids many wasted clock ticks waiting for data.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoAre you talking about the M1 Extreme? This is extremely expensive, and I suspect the dual die GPU only works because of Metal. TBH I prefer AMD's 7900 series approach of pushing the memory controller + cache out onto little memory controller dies. This allows for a monolithic GPU with a really wide bus, without all that wasted space on the controller/cache/pins. And those dies don't care about being split up since the memory access is interleaved anyway.
- 58028641 3y agoIsn’t it Pro, Max, Ultra?
- brucethemoose2 3y agothonk I can't remember, you are probably right. There is the little, medium, and big die, and the 2x big die.
- sliken 3y ago
- beebmam 3y agoWho cares? I genuinely haven't needed my phone to be faster for at least 5 years. The only reason my phone becomes slower is because of operating system bloat that they keep introducing on phones. Just give me an open OS, an old phone, and a web browser and I'm good. If I need serious computation I'll use a 400-core ephemeral cloud computer with 12 TB of RAM, or a modern GPU, depending on workload.
- NovaDudely 3y agoPretty much. My phone is an Oppo... something. If I benchmark it, it is considered very slow but in general use I never hit the ceiling. A part of all this more starts to look the same as people debating over super cars they will never own. Pure Philosophical. Yes, there will be many users, especially on here that have their use cases for this extra grunt. But more often than not, for the average person - they will never see or need it.
- msh 3y agoI have a mid-range android from work (Samsung a53) and the UI feels annoyingly sluggish compared to my iphone 12.
- beebeepka 3y agoI have a super low end Xiaomi that is 4 years old and feels just as snappy as when I bought it. I am very sensitive to lag of any sort. Been advocating for 120 Hz screens (on computers and TVs) back in 2000. What, exactly, is your point? Phones should get faster hardware because the UI is slow? Clearly not a hardware problem. Hasn't been one for at least a decade
- msh 3y agoI was responding to comments about people not needing faster phones and there was no need to compete on single core performance with apple. Apple phones are always fast in the UI. Some is fast hardware, some is software. But if samsung is not able to stripdown android to run decently on a midrange phone maybe they actually need the faster single core performance.
- ksec 3y ago>Nobody is even trying. They all have business strategies that prioritize other things. That is not true. Not even close. This is exactly what everyone said in 2020-2021 and suggest no one will ever catch up to Apple because they are so far ahead. From software industry / programming industry / web framework prominent figures, yes all the software guys all apparently have ZERO understanding about hardware. And then people blindly follows them as source of truth. If you actually follow the path of ARM Cortex-X design and using GeekBench as performance indicator ( Please dont argue about using Geekbench as reference ) They have seen performance increase with every generation edging towards Apple's Single Thread Performance. You have to also remember the lead time from design to market is roughly 3-4 years. So a lot of these designs started before the insane internet uproars. What was at one point 2-2.5x the difference in Single Thread Performance, Cortex X-4, on a N4 node, coming in later this year in Snapdragon Gen 3, should be within 8% difference on equal clock speed, compared to Apple's A16 on N5. I cant remember the ISO die size difference on X4 and A16, but what used to be the case ARM were only using 60% of die size compared to Apple in X2 era. I would imagine the X3 and X4 has gotten larger. But generally speaking ARM's design are much stricter in Die Size simply because that is their potential customer's margin. Of course, not every SoC vendor will use the maximum X4 design due to all sort of constrain. Especially on Android which tends to prioritise Multi-Thread scenario. That is not a CPU design issue, but a vendor issue. So unless Apple A17 has another 10-15% performance jump without increasing clock speed. The ARM Cortex X design is surprisingly close in terms of pref per watts and yet no one is talking about it. And the good thing about Cortex X design is that they are commercially available for license to anyone. Sony, LG, Samsung, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Oracle, or anyone with interest to fab their own SoC could buy the design from ARM. Heck even Intel or AMD.
- modeless 3y ago> all the software guys all apparently have ZERO understanding Leave the ad hominem on reddit please. > not every SoC vendor will use the maximum X4 design due to all sort of constrain > ARM's design are much stricter in Die Size simply because ... these are the exact "business strategies that prioritize other things" I was referring to. You are proving my point for me.
- re-thc 3y ago> Nobody is even trying. They all have business strategies that prioritize other things. That's not true. Everyone tried and gave up. The bully here isn't Apple. It's Qualcomm. They hold the modem patents and the modem market. A phone needs a modem. So when Qualcomm offers you a phone SoC that includes a modem do you take it? It's cheaper than you doing your own SoC + external Qualcomm modem and if you try to do your own modem they'll sue you. Back in the days nVidia tried to Tegra but was ultimately forced out by Qualcomm and their shady deals and price fixing. Even Apple tried / is trying with the whole Intel modem fiasco. Samsung tried with Exynos. Ultimately you're still stuck with Qualcomm and its modem so people give up.
- vietvu 3y agoThe only thing I care is better battery, I don't need more powerful CPU. Phones are insanely good already.