Hacker News Reader

Comment by codinghorror | Hacker News Reader

This -- is super freakin' cool. Real value add from Google, considering everyone is on the same very mediocre Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 platform. (Please PLEASE for the love of God, Google, build your own mobile SoCs so someone can remotely catch up to Apple's 3 year lead in mobile performance already)

Credible too because Pixel 2 had such stellar picture quality in the reviews.

View on HN

Chip making isn't magic. The more transistors you have the more things you can do. For example you can have more cache, more decoding units, more execution units etc. All this increase in complexity has costs which other phone manufacturer may or not want to pay for. Apple has a billion more transistors to work with. Will most consumers even notice the difference? will they pay more? Apple has a high asp so they can do it. How many other manfuctuers can do that?

> Will most consumers even notice the difference?

Well, it allows them to advance UI instead of just making it faster.

A. They are already working on one. I expect it to arrive with Pixel 3 next year.

B. It's really hard to develop your own SOCs let alone get it right. And, it'd be difficult to catch up with Apple's lead, but If'd to bet on someone, I'd bet on Google.

I'm curious why you think Google would be better at building SoC's than Qualcomm?

Anyone has to be better than Qualcomm, I hope. Their performance is just embarrassing at this point, relative to where Apple is. Compare:

https://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks

4214 versus 1965. And that's assuming you own the very very very latest Android device from this year. It gets far worse the deeper / older you go in years.

Qualcomm is seriously lagging Apple but so are Samsung and HiSilicon[0][1], they seem to be about the same performance. Android Authority [2] tried to explain why Apple is faster and their best argument (among a few) seems to be that Apple's silicon is just larger. Qualcomm could probably make larger chips if they get payed for it.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/11540/samsung-galaxy-s8-exyno...

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/11088/hisilicon-kirin-960-per...

[2] https://www.androidauthority.com/why-are-apples-chips-faster...

That's somewhat over-simplifying their argument - the long and the short of it though was that Qualcomm has different business interests in chip-making (ie, bulk, cheap, quick to produce) than Apple - so Qualcomm is extremely unlikely to ever match Apple.

Of course if Google did in-house SoC design and had Qualcomm as a manufacturer then of course they could do it, but that's so far no happened and at that point it's Google's chip practically speaking anyhow.

Qualcomm is fabless, just like most everyone else except for Intel at this point.

Oh well that’s even sadder for them then. I thought they still had some factories? They used to...

One of the other theories I've heard is that it's partly because 4 is an unlucky number in Chinese, which is a major market. Thus why so many SoC vendors pushed to 8 core chips instead of taking those extra transistors and spending them on an L3 cache instead, which would have helped real world performance far more than the extra 4 cores do.

Probably not very true, but it's a fun theory. More likely is it just looks better on the spec sheet to have more cores & ever higher burst-only frequencies rather than the things that would have more bang/buck on more real world workloads like an L3 cache would. It's why you ended up with ridiculous nonsense like the Helio X20 & X30 (10-core SoCs with only 2 good cores and 8 low power ones)

Those low power cores don't take up a vast amount of die area, but they substantially improve battery life. Apple seems wedded to the idea that 12 hours of screen-on time is sufficient, so they're happy to keep pushing for maximum performance; other manufacturers are willing to trade off a bit of performance for a lot more battery life.

2 low power cores help battery life as they can handle all the screen off and background activity. 8 low power cores is just stupid. That 10 core chip in practice will function like a 2+2 quad. The other 6 low powers will be doing nothing of value at all.

Samsung could make a faster chip, but they pretty much have to put a qcom chip in us phones due to the qcom tax. So having a s8 with wildly different preformance doesn't make sense. For example the exynos chips can do 4k60 but Samsung limits camera app to 4k30 to keep it in line with us phones.

that is a cpu score, most of the camera processing is done dsp with cpu only getting used for control so this would not be the right metric to compare.

right, that's why the (presumably) dedicated chip for post-processing is a nice value add, as my comment said..

I don't see how Apple makes use of that power. After experiencing the general slickness of the pixel and it's awesome HDR abilities, then observing the iPhone calculator input/ animation lag, I would say that extra power isn't put to any use.

That’s a silly comparison. The iPhone’s calculator is sloppy programming, but it’s not indicative of any particular performance issue.

There are a bunch of neat real-time effects ones iPhones, and ARKit is pretty cool. But it’s really the opportunities that high performance offers for devs that matter!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com