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Seems like an obscene amount of computing power for a phone. Who is pushing their phone that hard? Majority of people just want to send/receive texts and scroll
by cedws 2y ago
Seems like an obscene amount of computing power for a phone. Who is pushing their phone that hard? Majority of people just want to send/receive texts and scroll through Instagram.
- beached_whale 2y agoCan turn the chip off faster to save power probably.
- heyoni 2y agoIt almost definitely does and probably always runs at a fraction of that speed while using up the battery. Even current gen phones don’t do face recognition unless you’re connected to a charger.
- rvnx 2y agoLLM / Extracting objects from pictures / Generating pictures
- cedws 2y agoIsn't all the AI stuff running on Neural Engine, which is a separate coprocessor?
- Salgat 2y agoDepends, data preprocessing is often done on the CPU though.
- morsch 2y agoIsn't almost all of the AI stuff running in the cloud on dedicated hardware, drawing power that would melt an iPhone?
- dagw 2y agoThe whole selling point of Apples AI stuff is that the processing for most things can be done on the phone and thus your private data won't have to leave you device
- michaelmrose 2y agoSeems like the logical way to do that would be something like a mini without a monitor or keyboard plugged into your router. I fully expect remote solutions to smoke local options and an ultimate transition to remote solutions.
- dagw 2y agoI fully expect remote solutions to smoke local options Once you include the all the network overhead of sending images/video files to a server and back over a not very fast connection, I suspect it will be closer than you think for most real world use cases. And even if a cloud solution can improved the overall performance from say 4 seconds to 2 seconds, I don't see that as a huge win overall. All that being said Apple does also offer an AI cloud compute solutions for operation too heavy to run on the phone.
- heyoni 2y agoExcept what would have been a Mac mini plugged into your router is now handheld and way less janky than needing the user to maintain two separate devices.
- michaelmrose 2y agoThe phone doesn't have the memory/compute/cooling/or power budget to be a meaningful replacement for a desktop device which in turn doesn't hold a candle to the power or economy of doing it on the server side. Herein privacy and utility are clearly in tension. The only sane thing to do is do it on the server but if you ARE going to do it locally doing it on a computer on the clients premises is the only way to actually do it because mobile devices power/compute/cooling/power budgets are so anemic whatever a synthetic benchmark says a device can do in the space of a moment or two. I'm presuming that the ultimate strategy that a lot of players are going to actually follow is all server all the time wherein companies who are terribly concerned about privacy will rather than doing it locally do it on a server that they own.
- para_parolu 2y agoThese people will be fine with regular iphone 16.
- noncoml 2y agoYou underestimate what people do with their phones these days AR, CAD, Video Editing, games, etc.. Even just sending a video on WhatsApp requires transcoding
- ahmedfromtunis 2y agoExactly! It's not my fault that you are underutilizing the incredible marvel of engineering that is your smartphone. Reading and watching old sci-fi taught me to appreciate the technology I'm lucky to be in possession of and to take full advantage of it. Video calls, gaming, AR... are very compute intensive and need every last transistor to perform well.
- troupo 2y agoI... already do all that on my iPhone 12 Pro, and people have been doing that for a while now. For anything truly groundbreaking... Apple has too locked down of a system. And I say it as a long time fanboy
- heraldgeezer 2y agoYes I love gaming on my phone!! I love the feel of the inprecise touchscreen controls, the worse experience compared to a console or PC and all the ads and microtransactions!! Anyone that can afford a new iphone and games should just get a console or PC... jesus.
- okdood64 2y agohttps://direct.playstation.com/en-us/buy-accessories/backbone-one-playstation-edition-mobile-gaming-controller-iphone-lightning https://direct.playstation.com/en-us/buy-accessories/backbon...
- noncoml 2y agoI have to agree. I enjoy games so much better now that I always carry on me my second PS5 and my 36” 4k monitor. I have trouble getting on planes however because they won’t allow my True Sine Wave UPS through security.
- forgetfulness 2y agoInstagram. I was completely fine using a well-taken-care-of iPhone 8 until Instagram's input boxes became unusably slow on it, now I have an iPhone 13. I'm guessing that there'll be a race to make more powerful AI assistants, but makers of far more mundane apps will gobble up the computing power readily.
- deaddodo 2y agoInstagram's web app drains my computer's battery / knocks it into performance mode. It's obscene for a basic messaging and photo gallery site.
- zamfi 2y agoWhat is it actually doing with all that compute? Is it every animated thumbnail? Is it scaling thumbnail images? Re-flowing the page 120x/sec? Mining bitcoin? Anyone know?
- codersfocus 2y agoImproving the developer experience
- akomtu 2y agoSome sort of distributed face recognition offloaded to user devices?
- the_snooze 2y agoBloated JavaScript libraries and their bloated dependencies.
- lofaszvanitt 2y agoInstagram and FB eats a lot of memory on desktop too. Actually, a LOT of memory. Lots of times OOM kicks in, although on Linux only.
- piva00 2y ago
- Almondsetat 2y agoSeems like an obscene amount of computing power for a personal computer. Who is pushing their desktop that hard? Majority of people just want to send/receive emails and write a document.
- jchw 2y agoI know this is meant to be sarcastic, but it's a perfectly reasonable point. Not only that, it already came true; a lot of the time compute power has become so plentiful that we're more concerned about battery life and efficiency than actual raw grunt in personal computers. The main exceptions are gamers and people who use productivity software, but let's face it: Grandma does not need a 7995WX to log into Facebook.
- eesmith 2y agoYou are not wrong. Don't most people have a desktop computer which is less powerful than an M1? That strengthens the original comment, yes?
- decafninja 2y agoI’d go even further, at least anecdotally - most people don’t seem to have a desktop or even laptop computer these days. Literally none of my non-techie circle own a personal desktop. Only a few own a personal laptop - and even then, it only gets turned on occasionally. Most of them do all their personal computing on an iPad or smartphone.
- doublepg23 2y agoThey can subsidize the costs of developing fast chips with iPhone margins and then use the faster chip tech in their computers.
- michaelmrose 2y agoMobile computing performance is largely bounded not by how much work you can do this second but by how much work you do without exhausting your battery too quickly to be usable or overheating. Comparing them as if both were equally capable of going flat out is deceptive. Other things being equal working faster means spinning down quicker and using less juice.
- wslh 2y agoThat's exactly why I miss the Samsung DeX [1], it gave me the option to turn my mobile phone into a desktop, solving one choice problem. But, of course, there’s always another choice around the corner. I don’t even trust Linux in battery management, and while Chrome OS Flex [2] offers a decent alternative, in the end, I don’t miss notebooks and their battery-draining habits. I’ve learned to embrace the fruit… and its own ecosystem: iPhone + MacBook. I expect someone will really wake up soon, but as long as companies like Microsoft continue to be cash cows, I don't think it'll happen anytime soon. Even if Qualcomm makes the chips, Microsoft Windows won’t handle the energy efficiently. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_DeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_DeX [2] https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/ https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/
- paulryanrogers 2y agoHow were the thermals? I can't imagine doing anything CPU intense for more than a few seconds with how hot phones get.
- wslh 2y agoI remember that the Samsung ~S21 was frequently hot beyond the DeX, comparing to iPhone.
- wmf 2y agoApple showed several AAA games like Assassin's Creed running on iPhones.
- jsheard 2y agoBut approximately nobody actually bought them, which comes back to the point about all that compute power being a solution in search of a problem. People don't want to play AAA games on a phone. https://mobilegamer.biz/under-2000-people-have-paid-to-play-resident-evil-7-on-ios-estimates-say/ https://mobilegamer.biz/under-2000-people-have-paid-to-play-...
- ac29 2y agoThats a lousy article. Its based on 3rd party estimates of sales of a game released only 2 weeks before the article date. And, its a 2017 console title released on iOS in 2024, so presumably most fans of the series had already played it (it was released on 8 platforms before iOS). "AAA" is kinda a vague term, but there are definitely some big budget games on mobile that do massive numbers (hundreds of millions of dollars).
- guidedlight 2y agoThese aren’t games designed for touch devices. They are console games ported to iOS. To play them you need to pair a controller, making the experience subpar.
- idunnoman1222 2y agoLocal AI obviously
- troupo 2y agoNot with 8GB of RAM
- mensetmanusman 2y agoHow the ram is actually managed in the firmware can make the 8 GB number not entirely illuminating. Now, this is the case for software graphics, but it might not be the case for LLMs.
- melling 2y agoAdd a wireless keyboard, mouse and monitor then you’ve got a desktop computer. Not gonna happen from Apple but I’m eagerly awaiting the day.
- chairmanmow 2y agoAnd an operating system that's designed for it, because if you want to you can hook up those things now you can cobble something together hooking up those things but to call that experience "desktop like" is mostly held back by how much consideration iOS has put into the concept of a "cursor" designed for clicks. If you hook up a mouse to iOS and want a cursor, you need to turn on some assistive touch accessibility feature to get a circle that's about the size of an index finger tip, with about 10 times the click surface of an ordinary cursor. If you can activate a setting that feels like a hack and get past the bad cursor, only done 2/3 at a given time myself, but I'd imagine if you hook it up to a bigger screen, the resolution probably won't adapt and your cursor will be massive, but you can mirror an iPhone screen to a monitor. As far as using a wireless keyboard though, no issues I've really noted there, behaves like I'd expect a keyboard to, I was surprised when I could CMD-Tab to switch between apps on iOS like a desktop machine, surprised that feature exists in iOS because I don't see how you would invoke that except without an external keyboard, i.e. via touch, so it exceeded my expectations there by supporting that shortcut. If Apple elevated the cursor to less of an afterthought it would open things up a lot more.
- melling 2y agoYes, I want it to turn into macOS on the desktop.
- zer0zzz 2y agoEven for the most mundane phone usage I find the faster and faster socs being better at driving mobile safari to keep up with desktop websites. That alone I think is worth periodically upgrading.
- wenc 2y agoI need that kind of power, not for apps, but computational photography and videography.
- LeoPanthera 2y ago640k ought to be enough for anybody, huh?
- wredue 2y agoThat was in a time when people didn’t envision every person in the first world having access to their entire lives at their finger tips. I would tend to agree that today’s apps are… dogshit. Without a doubt, the vast majority of today workloads (99.9%) should be able to run on 2008ish era processing power if they were well programmed.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoI do. I can almost do my entire knowledge worker job from the phone. My 14 is getting slowed down by iOS Microsoft Office enhancements, so hopefully the 16 can make me just as productive as I was last year.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ein0p 2y agoThey also take pictures and videos. That takes a ton of compute nowadays, with all the computational photography stuff going on in the background. Most laptops cannot do realtime processing and compression of 8K video.
- mlsu 2y agoMy fiance takes a lot of videos on her phone. She has become a pretty talented video editor. Watching her “work” is actually a wild experience because it really is a whole different way of using a computer. She is comparably fast to someone on a desktop editor. 4K video editing — you need a pretty powerful desktop PC to smoothly edit/preview 4k video. CPU, GPU, and memory.
- samsolomon 2y agoI imagine at some point you’ll be able to take your phone to any screen and use it as a desktop computer. Obviously there are a lot of UI differences for touch vs keyboard interfaces, but it feels like that’s going to be the future at some point.
- dizhn 2y agoThey started allowing console emulators on the store very recently.