Galaxy S9 Slower Than iPhone X | Hacker News Reader

Galaxy S9 Slower Than iPhone X

tomsguide.com

29 pointslleddell21 comments

I'm a bit confused as why this is still such a big deal. A couple of years back when phones were a bit lackluster in performance I followed news like this all the time, but as we've passed the jank-barrier I really don't need the fastest phone to have a good experience anymore. I really hope these top-of-the-line phones stop being the "standard" and that they be regarded as enthusiast devices instead.

The media thrives on manufacturing controversy to drive clicks and create a self-feeding outrage conversation which they can then tap into. That's why.

Well put. Do you think that there is some truth when Trump calls it fake media?

No, not really.

> Do you think that there is some truth when Trump calls it fake media?

I'm not sure you understand what the word "fake" means.

This is a big deal because the next barrier of greater use is for a dockable phone to desktop environment.

You may not have heard about Dex, but Samsung has been pushing it since S8. This was the dream for window phones.

You may not care about performance but there will always be people that harp about mobile can't run Photoshop, etc. The natural progression of processing speed is important to some people.

AR uses all the power it can get. On-device ML becomes possible and practical. On top of that, the A series processors are also getting more energy efficient, so longer battery life.

I can't believe people are still making "640K should be enough for anyone" arguments after watching decades of waves of innovation crash over them.

I dont think a 20% performance difference is going to make people jump from Android to iOS or vice versa. That's solidly in the "only detectable by benchmarks" range.

I've personally moved to a ~3 year upgrade cycle, primarily driven by software support. I think I could happily use a smartphone for 5 years if I didn't care about having full support for the latest software.

Who's taking about switching? The question was whether YOY increases in performance still matter. I don't know about Android, but on iOS I see developers consistently rise to the challenge of a bigger performance envelope every year with new and innovative use cases. If that's something you don't care about, fine, but that doesn't mean the whole industry finds it pointless.

At least until the iPhone's battery wears down

The iPhone X has hardware fixes for that (In addition to the 8).

It won't slow down because of battery wear throttle. https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/2/6/16979288/ip...

Note this is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 based Galaxy S9, and not the Exynos 9810 based one. As far as we're aware, the Exynos based one is the quicker one (though obviously that's of little relevance to countries which aren't getting it!).

They're both on the 10nm node, but Apple/TSMC is moving to 7nm for this year's iphones (supposedly).

Won't Apple/TSMC's lead just get significantly larger this fall? How is Samsung/Qualcomm letting this happen?

Qualcomm is going to 7nm next year (with the 855), right? I'm not sure that Apple's lead will get significantly larger over the short term.

Although it does seem that Qualcomm isn't really doing anything that is likely to close the gap any time soon.

Core counts between the two aren't equal yet. The A11 is still using a 6 core processor and could seemingly bump that up to 8 cores and widen the gap more easily than Qualcomm could close it too.

Samsung own processors are nearer to Apple processors when it comes to speed its Qualcomm that is being left behind and Samsung phones in the US.

'Process technology size' is more of a marketing buzz word these days than an actual indication of anything meaningful. One company's Xnm process is not directly comparable to another's Ynm process..

I'd guess that the differences between Android and iOS architecture are much more important to user experience..

Totally. Pure processor speed stopped being a major driver of user interest in the early 2000s. Since then, it has been all about looks, feel, functionality (with the exception of the brief 'core count wars')

Apple's lead is already significant. Did you look at the benchmarks in the article? The iPhone transcoded the video in about 28% of the time!

If anything, Apple continues to pull away from Qualcomm with each generation. They have a serious emphasis on performance that Qualcomm just doesn't seem interested in matching. If you cold get an A* chip in an Android phone it would be a hot commodity for the top end models.

Ultimately it doesn't matter though. You can only get A* chips in iPhones and non-A* chips in everything else. There is effectively no competition here at the chip level.

Most Snapdragons are manufactured at TSMC too. If Apple is willing to pay top dollar to buy out the earliest 7nm runs, they might have an advantage until the process scales up a bit, but historically they havent had more than 6 months or so lead. They dont own TSMC, anyone who is willing to pay can manufacture on the same process.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com